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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
for it's isolation and the physics of this.
stability hardly strikes me I think roughly this is
as a defect of this true, but is there any
technology. reason for waste products
to be more dangerous than
Note that there is no ore?))
"coal waste disposal
problem" because it's
just accepted that the
bulk of the waste will
be pumped into the
air.
And this includes
radioactives embedded in
the coal. If coal plants
had to meet the same
standards as nukes, they'd
all be shut down.
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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
fuel enough to squeeze enough weapons
grade material to make some bombs? If
this was doable, I would guess the
material wouldn't be called "waste", it'd
be recycled and reused as fuel.)
(Try this factoid for a reality check:
nuclear fuel is enriched about 5%.
Weapons grade material is enriched about
95%. Two different animals.)
Beckman's book "The Health Hazards of _Not_ Going Nuclear"
isn't bad. Here's a couple of paragraphs from
p.102, Ch.4 "Waste Disposal":
The much used rhetoric about wastes remaining
"radioactive for thousands of years," while perfectly
true (the halflife of plutonium 239 is 24,400 years), is
quite misleading and largely meaningless... the longer
the halflife of an isotope, the less intense it's
radiation. Arsenic, which is not radioactive at all,
has an infinite halflife, and indeed, while plutonium
will be around for a long time, arsenic will be around
forever.
Nor is the point about arsenic (for example) a cheap
trick of demagoguery. As Prof. B. Cohen of the
University of Pittsburgh has pointed out, arsenic
trioxide is a poison used as a pesticide. It is not a
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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