Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank Lee
Nuclear sux, I don't want that poison laying around, unless there's a better way to deal with it.
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Yeah neither do I.
Luckily it isn't, unlike the crap coal plants put out. Just the fly ash from a Coal power plant contains enough thorium and uranium that if it were coming out of a nuclear plant then it would need to be treated as low-level waste!
But it isn't, they just let it blow away in the wind or bury it next to your house.
Waste from nuclear plants is safely stored away in below ground temporary repositories for now. In the future, if we reprocessed the waste (as France does), then we could store it in Yucca mountain and it would be no more radioactive than the original mined uranium in a few thousand years.
Dioxins released by coal burning power plants are a well established cause of cancer, and will be in our environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Also, unlike long lived radioactive isotopes, it actively accumulates in the Biosphere, getting worse as one moves up the food chain. It's a problem that will be even worse for our children. Of course, that problem isn't really scary, and doesn't serve as nice scapegoat that Greenpeace can continue to abuse to scare the public into supporting them.