Quote:
Originally Posted by RustyLugNut
Yet, the same people who believe in the cleanliness of solar and wind ignore the huge waste streams implied in the production and maintenance of these renewable sources.
Nuclear power is in an infant stage. What? Yes, the power plants in the majority of the worlds nuclear collection are half a century old! Modern designs will be more compact and produce lower volumes of waste.
Much of the cost of construction is due to legislation and protest. If we could modularize and standardize components costs would come down drastically instead of a custom construct for each plant. Also, the costs of security could be better distributed if reprocessing of spent fuel was done on-site.
And waste? The fearful populace forces the governmental overseers to err on the side of overt caution. Chernobyl's fall out zone has radiation below background over most of the outlying fallout area. It is still a forbidden zone. And Chernobyl was a stupid design. Why has radiation fallen so low so fast if the nuclear waste lasts thousands of years? Just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the really bad stuff is gone in a matter of years. Stuff like cesium and iodine are awful as they are ingested and retained. But, they have short half-life spans. 30 years or less. Modern nuclear power plants can avoid fission paths that minimize the more dangerous trans-uranics. The activated metals that make up the structure of a reactor can be simply simply stored on site until they "cool down".
For the giga-watts of power a nuclear reactor can produce in it's lifetime, the waste is small in comparison.
I dare you to find out the recycling costs of many square kilometers worth of solar cells and millions of wind and tidal generators and compare that to a few thousand tons of easily handled nuclear "waste".
And you can find a thousand years worth of nuclear fuel on most continents. Better yet, the ocean holds another thousand years or so of nuclear fuel dissolved in it's trillions of tons of water with the theorized replacement from undersea magma up-wellings from the earths core.
Practical fusion power may not happen in our lifetimes, but practical fission power should.
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Over the years I've heard this argument and wandered if there is a specific reference to this data which you could share.
I was inside IBM in Austin,Texas for 18-months and worked for an environmental consulting firm and saw inside a variety of different manufacturing facilities,and never saw a lack of pollution controls or industrial hygiene monitoring oversight.
Hazardous waste facilities were under constant oversight by state and federal authorities.
The only violations I was ever aware of,was by Texas Utilities,who illegally dumped PCBs into Lake Worth,via outside contractors,and hydrocarbon contaminated pipeline pigging wastewater into creeks near China Grove.