First up, it's not 500 million years. Nuclear waste (typically Plutonium 239) has a half life of around 24000 years, an eyeblink geologically. Even if it wouldn't be too flash for life as we know it for a while, the planet will be fine, and life will recover.

But yeah, there are undeniably problems with nuclear energy, which are addressed in the related video (http://videosift.com/video/Nuclear-energy-is-terrible).

We have essentially 3 choices:

1: ditch our energy rich lifestyle and go back to an agrarian economy with no cars, internet or whatever. This also means ditching lots of really nice stuff, like medical technology (drugs and MRI machines don't grow from pixie dust). Pretty unlikely, IMO.

2: Accept that the eco-system is basically fucked and learn to live with climate change. Depressingly, this is probably the most likely scenario.

3: Invest heavily into other energy sources. And, like it or not, that's got to include some form of nuclear. Renewable (solar, wind, tide) etc, will help, but they won't cover all of our energy needs and they have their own problems. So ideally, it's fusion, but practically, thorium seems the next best bet.

Option #3: the country might become destablised enough to halt construction/maintenance entirely and the site will be left to rot, more or less, like the nuclear arsenals/reactors of some nations.

Also keep in mind, this is how we deal with nuclear waste in a stable, wealthy and highly industrialised nation. "Just toss it over there" is the mantra during good times. Times are not good in Ukraine...

@VoodooV

do i sound angry to you?
you are injecting an emotional component that quite frankly is non-existent.

"an emotional rant that has been boiling for months"

um..what?
and just how did you discern these supposed pent up emotions?
what evidence have i presented that my accusing you of being a hypocrite and bully is somehow derived from some emotional cauldron of hate?

what device did you use to come to these conclusions?
was it magic?
a crystal ball?
did you fall into a vat of nuclear waste and somehow gained super powers to peer into another humans intentions?

again...you are projecting.

do you think i hate or dislike you?
do you think i am angry with you?
i dislike the hypocrisy.i dislike the bullying but those are only small aspects of a greater whole.
which is why i was pointing those aspects out.in my opinion you are better than those aspects and maybe i presume too much to feel that you are better than that.

once again i am truly saddened by your lack of understanding.
you seem to feel this is some personal vendetta,based on absolutely zero evidence.you also seem to be under the impression that i am using words to appeal to other sifters.never even considering that my usage may possibly be accurate and succinct.

has it even occurred to you that me pointing out that you are behaving badly may actually come from a standpoint of friendship?or is that a foreign concept to you?you seem to be so certain of your assumptions,yet i see no basis for them.

if you think that just because i point to your poor attitude in regards to certain people somehow translates to me hating or disliking you,you are so incredibly and concretely wrong.

i am truly sorry you do not understand.
my apologies for using words and terms that confuse you.i was not trying to be "cool" or gain the admiration of those who may be following our discussion.

"you proceed from a false assumption.i have no ego to bruise.of course..the ship is yours"

@BoneRemake
i am a man of faith.
do you feel as strongly about me as you do @bobknight33.
do you speak about me in the same tone?

everything i do.
everything i say.
every minute of every waking hour is based on my faith.
is born from my faith.

maybe it is because of my faith i read bobs commentary different.
when he states that human morality has moved on from biblical morality..he is correct.

and i thought it very prescient of him to recognize that fact.

in his second commentary i watched him attempt to express how the picture had become so much larger..and grander,which only served to cement his faith even stronger.he was not dismissing science,he was incorporating it into his faith.

which some here viewed as a dodge.
now maybe that is due to a pre-conceived idea of who bob actually is.
if you think bob is a fundamentalist then yes..his commentary may seem a tad...off.

but if you see bob as a man of faith,then his comment revealed a curiosity and desire to understand and an absolute awe at the way of things unfolding before us.

if we look at science as the understanding of the physical universe by way of theory,testing and repeatable applications of said testing.then science is actually the search for god/creator (from a faith viewpoint).

were you aware that 60% of surveyed scientists regarded themselves as people of *gasp* faith?

i see a lot of people making assumptions and presumptions about other sifters here on this thread.

so you need to ask yourself one question:
how did you come to your assumption in regards to anothers:motivations,intent,feelings,faith?

what tool did you use?

was it a crystal ball?
ouija board?
did you fall into a vat of nuclear waste and gain the super power of peering into another humans soul to discern their true intentions?

as humans we all assume to differing degrees,but if you are not a person of faith,then try to avoid those assumptions.

why not just ask bob?
he is usually gracious enough to interact with those he is full aware disagree with him..almost always.

ok.
enough ranting today.
you kids stay awesome,im off to get my pool ready !

@lantern53 @bobknight33

http://www.alternet.org/no-obama-didnt-lie-you-about-your-health-care-plans

just saying. @RFlagg is correct.
obamacare is a republican policy,or was initially.

and @lantern53
what is this drivel?:"hey RFlagg, you don't understand insurance, or business, or economics...all you know is what makes a utopia, and like all progressives, you don't know how to go about it, so you just make up rules, and devise policies, none of which work, but you have awesome intentions and the world would be a perfect place if only you were in charge.".

you peered into @RFlagg 's soul and discerned his innermost philosophies and all you could come up with is some one dimensional,vapid blather about "utopia"?

what special tool did you use to discern his most intimate visions and philosophies?
crystal ball?
are you a mystic?
did you fall into a vat of nuclear waste and survived only to find out you had superpowers to peer into a mans soul?

come on man.
what you posted in not only intellectually dishonest,it lacks imagination.
if you had shown some flair at least i could appreciate your comment for its creativity.
but its just the usual boring clever monkey flinging poop.

republican,democrat.
same animal.
i thought most people had come to terms that we were all being manipulated by those who wish to dominate and oppress in order to retain their silver crown.

you have more in common with Rflagg than you do with the very people fucking you and your family in the ass.
doesnt matter which team they play for.

disagree with him all you want but stop buying into this "republican versus democrat" bullshit line.
they are in a small club.
you aint in it..you will never be in it.
they dont like you..they will never like you.
the political class serves their own interests.
you? you can go fuck yourself.

or continue bickering with people you have more in common with while the elite class (that are holding all the cards) ass-rapes your kids future.

they like that.it serves their interests.
stop.
being.
a tool.
for the slave masters.

he's copycatting the "Radioactive Boyscout" who built a reactor in his backyard in 1995
http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/

it leaked radiation and he was picked up and his back yard was dug up, garage and all, and put into barrells and taken to nuclear waste area. The EPA were all in "space suits" in his yard, and he had tricked the nuclear regulatory agency and several places into providing him with info by faking his age and making fake letterheads.

the wild thing is the boy scout actually made a breeder reactor, but it was leaking a lot of radiation the EPA was registering radioactive material all over the yard and into neighbor yards.

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

It partly explains voter apathy on the Dem side. Obama was sent to the White house with a clear mandate (which he ran on), and he largely ignored it or "compromised" it away after he got there. And don't post me a link to that "lookie at what all Obama's done" page. It's horseshit. This election, many Dems are just voting for Obama because he's not Romney.

Also, fusion has been 30 years away for about 40 years now. How about a Manhattan Project-level effort towards that? In the meantime, let's help Japan build their space elevator so we can have a safe method of disposing all the nuclear waste from all the nuclear power plants we are going to need to build until fusion is viable.

Safe nuclear refers to many different new gen4 reactor units that rely on passive safety instead of engineered safety. The real difference comes with a slight bit of understanding of how nuclear tech works now, and why that isn't optimal.

Let us first consider this, even with current nuclear technology, the amount of people that have died as a direct and indirect result of nuclear is very low per unit energy produced. The only rival is big hydro, even wind and solar have a great deal of risk compared to nuclear as we do it and have done it for years. The main difference is when a nuclear plant fails, everyone hears about it...but when a oil pipeline explodes and kills dozens, or solar panel installers fall off a roof or get electrocuted and dies...it just isn't as interesting.

Pound per pound nuclear is already statistically very safe, but that isn't really what we are talking about, we are talking about what makes them more unsafe compared to new nuclear techs. Well, that has to do with how normal nukes work. So, firstly, normal reactor tech uses solid fuel rods. It isn't a "metal" either, it is uranium dioxide, has the same physical characteristics as ceramic pots you buy in a store. When the fuel fissions, the uranium is transmuted into other, lighter, elements some of which are gases. Over time, these non-fissile elements damage the fuel rod to the point where it can no longer sustain fission and need to be replaced. At this point, they have only burned about 4% of the uranium content, but they are all "used up". So while there are some highly radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods, the vast majority is just normal uranium, and that isn't very radioactive (you could eat it and not really suffer any radiation effects, now chemical toxicity is a different matter). The vast majority of nuclear waste, as a result of this way of burning uranium, generates huge volumes of waste products that aren't really waste products, just normal uranium.

But this isn't what makes light water reactors unsafe compared to other designs. It is all about the water. Normal reactors use water to both cool the core, extract the heat, and moderate the neutrons to sustain the fission reaction. Water boils at 100c which is far to low a temperature to run a thermal reactor on, you need much higher temps to get power. As a result, nuclear reactors use highly pressurized water to keep it liquid. The pressure is an amazingly high 2200psi or so! This is where the real problem comes in. If pressure is lost catastrophically, the chance to release radioactivity into the environment increases. This is further complicated by the lack of water then cooling the core. Without water, the fission chain reaction that generates the main source of heat in the reactor shuts down, however, the radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods are very unstable and generate lots of heat. So much heat over time, they end up causing the rods to melt if they aren't supplied with water. This is the "melt down" you always hear about. If you start then spraying water on them after they melt down, it caries away some of those highly radioactive fission products with the steam. This is what happened in Chernobyl, there was also a human element that overdid all their safety equipment, but that just goes to show you the worst case.

The same thing didn't happen in Fukushima. What happened in Fukushima is that coolant was lost to the core and they started to melt down. The tubes which contain the uranium are made from zirconium. At high temps, water and zirconium react to form hydrogen gas. Now modern reactor buildings are designed to trap gases, usually steam, in the event of a reactor breach. In the case of hydrogen, that gas builds up till a spark of some kind happens and causes an explosion. These are the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Both of the major failures and dangers of current reactors deal with the high pressure water; but water isn't needed to make a reactor run, just this type of reactor.

The fact that reactors have radioactive materials in them isn't really unsafe itself. What is unsafe is reactor designs that create a pressure to push that radioactivity into other areas. A electroplating plant, for example, uses concentrated acids along with high voltage electricity in their fabrication processes. It "sounds" dangerous, and it is in a certain sense, but it is a manageable danger that will most likely only have very localized effects in the event of a catastrophic event. This is due mainly to the fact that there are no forces driving those toxic chemical elements into the surrounding areas...they are just acid baths. The same goes for nuclear materials, they aren't more or less dangerus than gasoline (gas go boom!), if handled properly.

I think one of the best reactor designs in terms of both safety and efficiency are the molten salt reactors. They don't use water as a coolant, and as a result operate at normal preasures. The fuel and coolant is a liquid lithium, fluoride, and beryllium salt instead of water, and the initial fuel is thorium instead of uranium. Since it is a liquid instead of a solid, you can do all sorts of neat things with it, most notably, in case of an emergency, you can just dump all the fuel into a storage tank that is passively cooled then pump it back to the reactor once the issue is resolved. It is a safety feature that doesn't require much engineering, you are just using the ever constant force of gravity. This is what is known as passive safety, it isn't something you have to do, it is something that happens automatically. So in many cases, what they designed is a freeze plug that is being cooled. If that fails for any reason, and you desire a shutdown, the freeze plug melts and the entire contents of the reactor are drained into the tanks and fission stops (fission needs a certain geometry to happen).

So while the reactor will still be as dangerous as any other industrial machine would be...like a blast furnace, it wouldn't pose any threat to the surrounding area. This is boosted by the fact that even if you lost containment AND you had a ruptured emergency storage tank, these liquid salts solidify at temps below 400c, so while they are liquid in the reactor, they quickly solidify outside of it. And another great benefit is they are remarkably stable. Air and water don't really leach anything from them, fluoride and lithium are just so happy binding with things, they don't let go!

The fuel burn up is also really great. You burn up 90% of what you put in, and if you try hard, you can burn up to 99%. So, comparing them to "clean coal" doesn't really give new reactor tech its fair shake. The tech we use was actually sort of denounced by the person who made them, Alvin Weinberg, and he advocated the molten salt reactor instead. I could babble on about this for ages, but I think Kirk Sorensen explains that better than I could...hell most likely the bulk of what I said is said better by him



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

But the real question is why. Why use nuclear and not solar, for instance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

This is the answer. The power of the atom is a MILLION times more dense that fossil fuels...a million! It is a number that is beyond what we can normal grasp as people. Right now, current reactors harness less that 1% of that power because of their reactor design and fuel choice.

And unfortunately, renewables just cost to darn much for how much energy they contribute. In that, they also use WAY more resources to make per unit energy produced. So wind, for example, uses 10x more steal per unit energy contributed than other technologies. It is because renewables is more like energy farming.

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


This is a really great video on that maths behind what makes renewables less than attractive for many countries. But to rap it up, finally, the real benefit is that cheap, clean power is what helps makes nations great. There is an inexorable link with access to energy and financial well being. Poor nations burn coal to try and bridge that gap, but that has a huge health toll. Renewables are way to costly for them per unit energy, they really need other answers. New nuclear could be just that, because it can be made nearly completely safe, very cheap to operate, and easier to manufacture (this means very cheap compared to today's reactors as they are basically huge pressure vessels). If you watch a couple of videos from Kirk and have more questions or problems, let me know, as you can see, I love talking about this stuff Sorry if I gabbed your ear off, but this is the stuff I am going back to school for because I do believe it will change the world. It is the closest thing to free energy we are going to get in the next 20 years.

In reply to this comment by ReverendTed:
Just stumbled onto your profile page and noticed an exchange you had with dag a few months back.
What constitutes "safe nuclear"? Is that a specific type or category of nuclear power?
Without context (which I'm sure I could obtain elsewise with a simple Google search, but I'd rather just ask), it sounds like "clean coal".

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/01/should_we_throw_hazardous_waste_into_volcanoes.html

>> ^BoneRemake:

Boneremake wonders if we could put nuclear waste into such openings. Hrm ?
maybe put a steel plate over it.
Hope it goes away.

>> ^BoneRemake:

Boneremake wonders if we could put nuclear waste into such openings. Hrm ?
maybe put a steel plate over it.
Hope it goes away.


I like your logic! I'd vote for you.

Boneremake wonders if we could put nuclear waste into such openings. Hrm ?

maybe put a steel plate over it.

Hope it goes away.

I was giving statistics for the USA. The fear of nuclear energy is irrational. Given a near-worst case scenario like in Japan, no one dies from radiation and a very limited geographic area is made unusable and access is easily restricted. For the life of me I can't understand why people continue to be willing to fill the atmosphere with CO2, and other pollutants, while such a clean alternative is readily available. An individual's lifetime energy consumption footprint is less than a baseball size piece of nuclear waste. Bury it a mile deep in the desert and it will remain there for a million years.
>> ^Fletch:

>> ^snoozedoctor:
Number killed by radiation from nuclear power generation in the last 40 years, about zero.

Chernobyl?
But you are right. Perspective needed. I think nuclear power will be one of very few options for large and consistent amounts of power generation in the future, assuming wind and solar don't become vastly more efficient and take off in a MUCH bigger way. We are on the downward slope of the bell curve of available oil and fusion has been 30 years away for the last 40 years. There are safer, cleaner, more inherently stable nuclear options out there that could win over those opposed to nuclear power, although I think most opposition today is based on ignorance and unwarranted fear.

I always wondered why to my mother that we couldn't just throw all the nuclear waste into a volcano like Kīlauea?? Could we? Have they!?
I think this is a good explanation. FROM INTERNET

Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there’s a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity. “Unfortunately,” Rowe says, “volcanoes just aren’t very hot.”

Lava in the hottest volcanoes tops out at around 2,400˚F. (These tend to be shield volcanoes, so named for their relatively flat, broad profile. The Hawaiian Islands continue to be formed by this type of volcano.) It takes temperatures that are tens of thousands of degrees hotter than that to split uranium’s atomic nuclei and alter its radioactivity to make it inert, Rowe says. What you need is a thermonuclear reaction, like an atomic bomb—not a great way to dispose of nuclear waste.

Volcanoes aren’t hot enough to melt the zirconium (melting point 3,371˚) that encases the fuel, let alone the fuel itself: The melting point of uranium oxide, the fuel used at most nuclear power plants, is 5,189˚. The liquid lava in a shield volcano pushes upward, so the rods probably wouldn’t even sink very deep, Rowe says. They wouldn’t sink at all in a stratovolcano, the most explosive type, exemplified by Washington’s Mount St. Helens. Instead, the waste would just sit on top of the volcano’s hard lava dome—at least until the pressure from upsurging magma became so great that the dome cracked and the volcano erupted. And that’s the real problem.

A regular lava flow is hazardous enough, but the lava pouring out of a volcano used as a nuclear storage facility would be extremely radioactive. Eventually it would harden, turning that mountain’s slopes into a nuclear wasteland for decades to come. And the danger would extend much farther. “All volcanoes do is spew stuff upward,” Rowe says. “During a big eruption, ash and gas can shoot six miles into the air and afterward circle the globe several times. We’d all be in serious trouble.”

I always wondered why to my mother that we couldn't just throw all the nuclear waste into a volcano like Kīlauea?? Could we? Have they!?