Taking a good and honest look at waste disposal leads inevitably to the conclusion that it's not that big a deal, let alone a showstopper.
If we want to get off fossil fuels, stop spitting unimaginable amounts of crud into the atmosphere, and move to a hydrogen economy, nuclear fission is the only workable answer, until we figure out how to build large-scale orbital structures.
How is waste disposal "not that big of a deal"!? Have you followed the Yucca Mountain debate at all? Where would you suggest we put it? There's transportation risks, storage risks, the fact that this stuff lasts nigh on forever... I think if you talk to people from Nevada or Utah you'll find that it is that big of a deal.
It's politically a big deal, because people are ignorant, and somehow thing that a sufficiently widely-dispersed cost is like no cost at all. But as a practical matter, you can take the stuff, wrap it in plastic, and dump it to the bottom of the seafloor at a subduction zone, and the effects on the environment will be negligible.
For all the FUD surrounding nuclear waste, what gets overlooked are what tiny amounts we're talking about. With PWRs and similar fuel cycles based off lightly-enriched uranium, you generate about 66 pounds of high-level waste per megawatt of plant per year, which works out to about one cubic meter of the stuff for a 1,000 megawatt reactor.
That's, all things considered, incomprehensibly tiny. You're looking at about a 93% duty cycle for PWRs, so a 1,000 megawatt reactor turns out 33 tons of waste in the course of generating 30 terajoules of energy.
That's *nothing*. It *doesn't* last 'nigh on forever,' because it's very radioactive, which means short half-life. The amount of waste is massively tiny, and volumetrically tiny, and even with the current weapons-based fuel cycle we currently use, there are a variety of things we could do with it that would have no significant environmental impact, but we can't do them, because they're politically unviable because people are stupid and get shit-scared everytime they hear the word 'nuclear.' With a sane, designed-from-bottom-up fuel cycle, you could take that waste and burn it in other reactors stages, getting more energy out of it and reducing the amount of waste you end up having to dispose of, but DOE regulations prohibit that in this country.
You want to talk about stuff that lasts forever? Right now, we get most of our electricity from burning coal. To generate 30 terajoules of energy with coal, you need to burn 1355 tons of the stuff, assuming perfect conversion. For every pound of coal you burn, you get 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide. So that's almost seven million pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, every year, for every 1,000 megawatts of coal plant. Now, coal has a lot of heavy metals in it. Lead, arsenic, and so forth. That ideally gets scrubbed out at the stack, but that still leaves you with many many tons of toxic solids to dispose of. Really, they present the same difficulties as disposal of solid radioactive wastes. You don't want them stores in rusting and leaking containers, leaching into groundwater, or anything like that, right? And that stuff *does* last forever. Radioactivity fades with time, but arsenic lasts forever.
And coal has radioisotopes in it as well. In one year alone, coal plants in just the US release more than 800 tons of uranium, containing 11,000 pounds of fissile U-235, and about 2000 tons of fissile thorium isotopes, right into the atmosphere. That's real radioactivity, it causes real cancers, and kills real people. Take a look at this paper (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html) for some good detail on the nasty stuff that comes out of a coal plant. But the people in Nevadah and Utah don't care about that, do they?
The WHO estimates that air pollution is responsible for over 1.6 million deaths per year, worldwide. There is no reasonable scenario by which nuclear waste could come close to that level of lethality and risk. You could dump it down to the bottom of an abyssal trench in PVC barrels, and you'd do nowhere near as much damage to human life and the global environment as the other stuff we're doing. But, as I said, people think that if you distribute a cost over a wide enough area or population, it's the same as if that cost doesn't exist at all. But that's not true, you can't eliminate a cost in that fashion.
And I don't care about what ignorant people in Nevada and Utah think. Why should I pay more attention to them than to those 1.6 million dead, each year?
I am in NO way saying that coal is good. "Clean Coal Technology" or whatever this administration wants to call it is right up there with "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forest." Coal is horrible...Everything from the mining to the burning causes severe health and environmental issues. We get about 50% of our electricity from coal and it's responsible for 90% of the carbon emissions from power generation (which is about a third of the U.S. carbon emissions overall). It's a horrible system.
Nuclear power will get us away from fossil fuels. It's cleaner. It's more cost effective. But it's still not the be-all answer. Even if you get over the perception hurdles other questions are raised...The numbers I find are that there are what...50 years left of low-cost uranium in current measured resources? Yes, we can move to lower-grade or more expenisve sources or even other materials like thorium, but you're still linking yourself to a finite resource for all our power needs.
I admit, I went too far...nuclear power is not all bad. But it's not the panacea to all our energy woes either. There's still too many issues to make me feel completely sanguine. And burying things are the sea floor with "negligible" environmental results sounds too much like a whitewash when you're discussing an ecosystem that we know very little about and have no way of knowing how ANY human intereference from burying nuclear waste to carbon sequestration could have in reality.
Here's a good piece (http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/) that details that yes, nuclear will be an important option in the future, especially as world energy consumption increases, but that there are still a lot of questions that need answered and again, I don't believe it's a panacea. We need to find a way to make *renewable* energy resources viable.
The numbers I find are that there are what...50 years left of low-cost uranium in current measured resources?
Sure, but the whole definition of 'reserves' means that reserves increase as costs goes up. Fission fuels are so energy-dense that the costs of the fuel are only a very tiny part of the net electricity cost to the end-user - the fuel costs could double, and the cost per kilowatt-hour would see an increase in a couple of cents as a result.
We've got 50 years of known reserves at current fuel costs, in other words. If costs rise, even a little, reserves increase drastically. If costs double, extraction of uranium from seawater becomes economically feasible, and there are a constantly-replenishing 4,000 million tons of uranium dissolved in the oceans, compared to the 3.5 million tons of that 50-year reserve.
And other reactor technologies are entirely feasible. Breeders allow conversion of U-238 to fissionable fuel. If you bypass uranium entirely, and build reactors to fission thorium, there's more than three times as much thorium around as there is uranium, and you can breed it to U-233 without needing a source of fast neutrons.
We need to find a way to make *renewable* energy resources viable.
There's nothing particularly great about renewability. I had a friend working on a system for small-scale power generation in 3rd-world countries with little industrial base. It consisted of a type of very fast-growing shrub, and a solar furnance to convert the biomass into charcoal. The plant was very adept at fixing carbon, so whatever carbon released into the atmosphere would be compensated for by the growth of the plant itself.
Completely renewable. Completely impractical for large-scale use.
I'm convinced fusion's never going to happen. You want clean, essentially-infinite energy resources, you build large solar collectors in orbit and transmit the power back down to collector grids on Earth in the form of microwaves.
Once we can build large-scale orbital structures, we'll have all the energy we could ever want, at least until we move up a level on the Kardashev scale. We just need something that can keep us going until then. Whatever bad effects switching entirely to nuclear power will have, I'm pretty sure we can weather them for a couple of hundred years or so, at which point we won't need it anymore, far better than we can weather the effects of whatever else we have available to keep us going for that same amount of time.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-23 04:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-23 07:26 pm (UTC)Besides, we really need to take a good and honest look at nuclear power (especially waste disposal).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 11:52 am (UTC)If we want to get off fossil fuels, stop spitting unimaginable amounts of crud into the atmosphere, and move to a hydrogen economy, nuclear fission is the only workable answer, until we figure out how to build large-scale orbital structures.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 01:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 02:25 pm (UTC)It's politically a big deal, because people are ignorant, and somehow thing that a sufficiently widely-dispersed cost is like no cost at all. But as a practical matter, you can take the stuff, wrap it in plastic, and dump it to the bottom of the seafloor at a subduction zone, and the effects on the environment will be negligible.
For all the FUD surrounding nuclear waste, what gets overlooked are what tiny amounts we're talking about. With PWRs and similar fuel cycles based off lightly-enriched uranium, you generate about 66 pounds of high-level waste per megawatt of plant per year, which works out to about one cubic meter of the stuff for a 1,000 megawatt reactor.
That's, all things considered, incomprehensibly tiny. You're looking at about a 93% duty cycle for PWRs, so a 1,000 megawatt reactor turns out 33 tons of waste in the course of generating 30 terajoules of energy.
That's *nothing*. It *doesn't* last 'nigh on forever,' because it's very radioactive, which means short half-life. The amount of waste is massively tiny, and volumetrically tiny, and even with the current weapons-based fuel cycle we currently use, there are a variety of things we could do with it that would have no significant environmental impact, but we can't do them, because they're politically unviable because people are stupid and get shit-scared everytime they hear the word 'nuclear.' With a sane, designed-from-bottom-up fuel cycle, you could take that waste and burn it in other reactors stages, getting more energy out of it and reducing the amount of waste you end up having to dispose of, but DOE regulations prohibit that in this country.
You want to talk about stuff that lasts forever? Right now, we get most of our electricity from burning coal. To generate 30 terajoules of energy with coal, you need to burn 1355 tons of the stuff, assuming perfect conversion. For every pound of coal you burn, you get 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide. So that's almost seven million pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, every year, for every 1,000 megawatts of coal plant. Now, coal has a lot of heavy metals in it. Lead, arsenic, and so forth. That ideally gets scrubbed out at the stack, but that still leaves you with many many tons of toxic solids to dispose of. Really, they present the same difficulties as disposal of solid radioactive wastes. You don't want them stores in rusting and leaking containers, leaching into groundwater, or anything like that, right? And that stuff *does* last forever. Radioactivity fades with time, but arsenic lasts forever.
And coal has radioisotopes in it as well. In one year alone, coal plants in just the US release more than 800 tons of uranium, containing 11,000 pounds of fissile U-235, and about 2000 tons of fissile thorium isotopes, right into the atmosphere. That's real radioactivity, it causes real cancers, and kills real people. Take a look at this paper (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html) for some good detail on the nasty stuff that comes out of a coal plant. But the people in Nevadah and Utah don't care about that, do they?
The WHO estimates that air pollution is responsible for over 1.6 million deaths per year, worldwide. There is no reasonable scenario by which nuclear waste could come close to that level of lethality and risk. You could dump it down to the bottom of an abyssal trench in PVC barrels, and you'd do nowhere near as much damage to human life and the global environment as the other stuff we're doing. But, as I said, people think that if you distribute a cost over a wide enough area or population, it's the same as if that cost doesn't exist at all. But that's not true, you can't eliminate a cost in that fashion.
And I don't care about what ignorant people in Nevada and Utah think. Why should I pay more attention to them than to those 1.6 million dead, each year?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 03:55 pm (UTC)Nuclear power will get us away from fossil fuels. It's cleaner. It's more cost effective. But it's still not the be-all answer. Even if you get over the perception hurdles other questions are raised...The numbers I find are that there are what...50 years left of low-cost uranium in current measured resources? Yes, we can move to lower-grade or more expenisve sources or even other materials like thorium, but you're still linking yourself to a finite resource for all our power needs.
I admit, I went too far...nuclear power is not all bad. But it's not the panacea to all our energy woes either. There's still too many issues to make me feel completely sanguine. And burying things are the sea floor with "negligible" environmental results sounds too much like a whitewash when you're discussing an ecosystem that we know very little about and have no way of knowing how ANY human intereference from burying nuclear waste to carbon sequestration could have in reality.
Here's a good piece (http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/) that details that yes, nuclear will be an important option in the future, especially as world energy consumption increases, but that there are still a lot of questions that need answered and again, I don't believe it's a panacea. We need to find a way to make *renewable* energy resources viable.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 06:13 pm (UTC)Sure, but the whole definition of 'reserves' means that reserves increase as costs goes up. Fission fuels are so energy-dense that the costs of the fuel are only a very tiny part of the net electricity cost to the end-user - the fuel costs could double, and the cost per kilowatt-hour would see an increase in a couple of cents as a result.
We've got 50 years of known reserves at current fuel costs, in other words. If costs rise, even a little, reserves increase drastically. If costs double, extraction of uranium from seawater becomes economically feasible, and there are a constantly-replenishing 4,000 million tons of uranium dissolved in the oceans, compared to the 3.5 million tons of that 50-year reserve.
And other reactor technologies are entirely feasible. Breeders allow conversion of U-238 to fissionable fuel. If you bypass uranium entirely, and build reactors to fission thorium, there's more than three times as much thorium around as there is uranium, and you can breed it to U-233 without needing a source of fast neutrons.
We need to find a way to make *renewable* energy resources viable.
There's nothing particularly great about renewability. I had a friend working on a system for small-scale power generation in 3rd-world countries with little industrial base. It consisted of a type of very fast-growing shrub, and a solar furnance to convert the biomass into charcoal. The plant was very adept at fixing carbon, so whatever carbon released into the atmosphere would be compensated for by the growth of the plant itself.
Completely renewable. Completely impractical for large-scale use.
I'm convinced fusion's never going to happen. You want clean, essentially-infinite energy resources, you build large solar collectors in orbit and transmit the power back down to collector grids on Earth in the form of microwaves.
Once we can build large-scale orbital structures, we'll have all the energy we could ever want, at least until we move up a level on the Kardashev scale. We just need something that can keep us going until then. Whatever bad effects switching entirely to nuclear power will have, I'm pretty sure we can weather them for a couple of hundred years or so, at which point we won't need it anymore, far better than we can weather the effects of whatever else we have available to keep us going for that same amount of time.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-23 10:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 11:51 am (UTC)