Bush Admin = Nukes t3h good!

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Zkribbler


Except when it goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong...as in the Enrico Fermi plant near Detroit, Three Mile Island and especially Chernobyl.

And where oh where can we store all the highly toxic nuclear waste for the 1/2 million or so years it takes to become non-radioactive??

Erm...that's why we're reprocessing the waste, so we cna use it again and again...

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Terra Nullius
Renewable fissionable material. I'd like to see that.

France has been doing that for decades.

However, you can't recycle 100% of the material (only 96%), so you do end up with some radioactive garbage. But still, nuclear energy is infinitely clear than fossil energy.

[chequita guevara]

Wave generators will make nukes obsolete.

[Zkribbler]

Erm...that's why we're reprocessing the waste, so we cna use it again and again...

4th paragraph of the article:

The notion of accepting other countries' spent fuel at a time when the United States has had trouble disposing of its own nuclear waste could also prove highly controversial.

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Except when it goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong...as in the Enrico Fermi plant near Detroit, Three Mile Island and especially Chernobyl.

And where oh where can we store all the highly toxic nuclear waste for the 1/2 million or so years it takes to become non-radioactive??

The Enrico Fermi power plant was not only an early design, but no radiation was released from the builiding into the enviroment when it had its accident. Three Mile Island posed no risk to the general public and is an example of a vastly overhyped nuclear accident. Chernobyl was the result of a vastly unsafe Soviet design where they did something increadibly stupid to boot, and doesn't resemble current US nuclear reactors, let alone ones we can build today. With a modern design, its practically impossible to have a serious nuclear meltdown.

As far as storing the radioactive waste goes, you might want to consider how much uranium and thorium gets released into the atmosphere each year due to coal burning power planets!

Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

When you consider the effects on the enviroment from fossil fuel power plants emmiting greenhouse gases, storing the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is by far the lesser of the two evils. The reprocessing Bush is talking about by the way vastly decreases the amount of nuclear waste we have to deal with. We can do the storing of the waste fairly safely, while continuing to rely on fossil fuels guarentees that the bad things I already talked about will continue to happen.

[Jonny]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Except when it goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong...as in the Enrico Fermi plant near Detroit, Three Mile Island and especially Chernobyl.

Enrico Fermi and Three Mile Island weren't exactly "very, very wrong" incidents. Both of those incidents introduced miniscule, almost to the point of being insignificant, amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Their only true victim was support for nuclear power in the U.S. The impact of Chernobyl would have been much less if the Soviets had built a complete containment building for the reactor (as was and still is standard essentially everywhere else in the world), thus prohibiting the escape of radioactive particles directly into the atmosphere.

Newer-design plants are safer than those based on 30-40 year old designs, anyway. For example, new pebble-bed reactors are designed so that not even a coolant failure will result in a meltdown.


Edit: x-post with Mordoch. I see that the others have addressed the waste situation, so I won't comment for the time being.

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Wave generators will make nukes obsolete.

Doubtful. They are expensive to build and many designs potentially pose barriers for shipping. They also are not really viable for areas well away from the coast, due to problems transporting electricity over really long distances.

Regardless, we shouldn't wait for renewable energy to be able to solve all our problems when we can do something about fossil fuel burning power plants right away.

[chequita guevara]

New wave generator design is extremely efficient. We just need to work on tranmission problems.

As for nuke tech, my buddy in the navy told me that the problem with all private U.S. nukes is that they are all prototypes. Unlike in the military or Japan, France, etc. Every new nuke plant in the U.S. is a new design, so there's no standardization. He was a nuke tech for a boomer.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Mordoch
its practically impossible to have a serious nuclear meltdown.

It's the "practically impossible" part that scares the #@^&&!! out of me.

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
It's the "practically impossible" part that scares the #@^&&!! out of me.

Let me makes things more clear then. A worse case nuclear meltdown in the US would release way less radiation into the general enviroment than any coal power plant releases every year. Three Mile Island should be held as an example of how even when things go terribly wrong with US nuclear power plants, there isn't any real risk to the general public.

The only reason Chernobyl caused so many problems was that the Soviets failed to have a proper concrete containment vessal for the plant. Trying to compare that situation to the risk of nuclear power in the US is an apple and organges situation.

[Zkribbler]

Okay...you now have your happy little nuclear plant perculating along, producing nuclear waste. What do you do with the waste??

[chequita guevara]

I should be the government why? They've lied about everything else related to nukes.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Okay...you now have your happy little nuclear plant perculating along, producing nuclear waste. What do you do with the waste??

And we are doing what with all the toxins that a coal plant produces?

At least we have a plan to safely bury nuclear waste and are willing to spend billions to make it as safe as it can be.

[chequita guevara]

The toxins from a coal plant degrade a lot more quickly than nuke waste.

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
The toxins from a coal plant degrade a lot more quickly than nuke waste.

Flagrantly wrong actually. Check out the half lives of uranium and thorium, which I already noted get emmited by the ton each year from coal power plants, its actually much greater than the half lifes of the various nuclear reactor waste products, especially compared to the most dangerous ones.

Basically instead of going into our lungs, the waste products from nuclear power plants can be carefully stored in one place with safety measures taken to make sure they stay there.