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NUKE
Yes, Nukes
Perhaps I should hesitate to rehash
the nuke debate of the 70s, but I'm
a firm believer that nuclear power
has gotten a bad rap.
A few points in support: It's really
lung cancer and such from interesting to me
the emissions of that so many
coal-burning power plants intelligent,
has been estimated to well-educated people
kill on the order of deeply believe that
thousands of people a (In the nuclear power is Or maybe they
year. You'd need to have US.) overwhelmingly believe that
a melt down every year dangerous. it's worse to
for nuclear to be worse die from lung
than the coal we're I might be able cancer from a
using. to understand nuclear
coming down on accident than
And the actual the opposite from coal
effects of the side of this power
anti-nuke movement debate, but many emissions?
was not to promote people seem to
solar power use. think that there
The utilities isn't even
shelved plans for anything that
nukes and built can be debated.
coal burners
instead. This is a case worthy of
inclusion in a modern sequel
The cost of nuclear power, to _Extraordinary Popular
by the way, was also much Delusions and the Madness of
inflated by the actions of Crowds_. Maybe our
the anti-nuke movement, and collective intelligence
calling it "too costly" is hasn't progressed very far
a lot like burning since the Victorian era?
someone's house down and
then arresting them for
vagrancy.
As for nuclear waste
disposal, this is much more
of a political problem than a
technical one. Radioactive
ore occurs naturally,
and digging it up,
concentrating it, and
stashing it in a site chosen I need to verify the
for it's isolation and physics of this. I think
stability hardly strikes me roughly this is true, but
as a defect of this is there any reason for
technology. waste products to be more
dangerous than ore?
Note that there is no (1/20/09)
"coal waste disposal What I think happens:
problem" because it's
just accepted that the Running the radioactives
bulk of the waste will through a fission reaction
be pumped into the does indeed create a number of
air. very hot, exotic species --
you need to contain the waste,
And this includes and be more careful with it
radioactives embedded in than the original ore.
the coal. If coal plants
had to meet the same But the hot stuff decays
standards as nukes, they'd the fastest -- when an anti-nuke
all be shut down. person tells you it needs to
be contained for a gazillion
years they're playing games
with the numbers: yeah, if you
want it all to decay to lead
it'll take that long, but it
gets much less dangerous, much
more quickly than that.
Consider just as a thought experiment,
dumping the waste in the ocean. If
your canisters are good, maybe it gets
buried and you don't release anything.
If they leak somehow, and it gets into
the sea water, there still wouldn't be
any measurable change in the
concentration in the stuff that's there
already.
This probably isn't the right
way to do it, but I take it
as the baseline: we can
clearly do better than this.
(Mander's idea that we need armed guards (see MILCOMP for ref).
on nuclear waste strikes me as kind of
whacky. Does he expect a terrorist
attack in the southwest US, by people
equipped to transport massive amounts of
hot stuff without getting fried, who have
the capabilities to refine spent nuclear (1/20/09)
fuel enough to squeeze enough weapons
grade material to make some bombs? If Oddly enough, it turns
this was doable, I would guess the out that a lot of the
material wouldn't be called "waste", it'd stuff we call "waste"
be recycled and reused as fuel.) really *should* be
recycled first to recover
(Try this factoid for a reality check: useful fuel from it
nuclear fuel is enriched about 5%. and reduce the waste
Weapons grade material is enriched about further.
95%. Two different animals.)
Once again,
there are odd
political
problems:
Beckman's book "The Health Hazards Could the recyc
of _Not_ Going Nuclear" isn't bad. plants be used
Here's a couple of paragraphs from to enrich
p.102, Ch.4 "Waste Disposal": weapons grade
fuel?
"The much used rhetoric about wastes remaining
'radioactive for thousands of years,' while perfectly Is the recycling
true (the halflife of plutonium 239 is 24,400 years), process itself
is quite misleading and largely meaningless... the safe enough?
longer the halflife of an isotope, the less intense
it's radiation. Arsenic, which is not radioactive at (Probably:
all, has an infinite halflife, and indeed, while but it's not
plutonium will be around for a long time, arsenic will a bad thing
be around forever. to check.
Uranium
"Nor is the point about arsenic (for example) a cheap Hexaflouride
trick of demagoguery. As Prof. B. Cohen of the doesn't
University of Pittsburgh has pointed out, arsenic sound like
trioxide is a poison used as a pesticide. It is not a fun.)
very commonly used one, but more of it (in weight) is
imported every year than all the nuclear wastes would
amount to if all US power were nuclear. Arsenic
trioxide is about 50 times more toxic than plutonium
when ingested (for plutonium being 'the most toxic
substance known to man' is more melodramatic piffle),
but the main difference compared with the threat of
wastes is this: Nuclear wastes, when there are enough
of them, will be buried deep underground in carefully
chosen geological formations. But the arsenic trioxide
is dispersed in random places on the earth's surface,
mainly where food is grown. Long after the nuclear
wastes have decayed to negligible levels, it will still
be around in the biosphere."
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