Nuclear Power - your thoughts? (survey)

Nuclear power, in the United States at least, is a moot point ... there has not been a new commercial power plant built in decades, nor are any being planned. The existing plants will finish their useful life at some point, and that will be that.

The plants are so expensive because of the strict licensing requirements to cover safety and containment concerns. Economics aside, all the engineering concerns (shielding, containment, core cooling, etc) have been adequately addressed except for the elephant in the room ... the issue of what the hell to do with the spent cores. But that issue is so glaring and so malevolent that it alone should be enough to stop further plant licensing. Which it effectively has in the US.

Since there are no new plants being planned, the whole nuclear power question is old hat, really. The only place where nuclear power is still viable is in submarines and aircraft carriers.

But just for conversation's sake ... we should compare the safety record of nuclear power plants vs other types, since everyone always brings up "safety" as a concern with nuclear plants. In the US, since the first commercial plants were built in the 1950's, not one single life has been lost due to nuclear issues ... meaning radiation. There is no "fall out", as some people have mentioned in this thread, because there is no nuclear explosion in the sense of nuclear weapons.

Compare this to the hundreds or thousands of oilfield workers who have died in fires, explosions, and whatnot, or to the coal miners who have died from black lung disease, emphysema, or mine collapses. Also consider the atmospheric degradation due to fossil fuel burning. And coal-fired plants actually release more radioactivity into the atmosphere than do nuclear plants, because of the radioactive carbon-14 in the coal.

All of this is just spitting into the wind, however. What to do with high-level radioactive waste from spent cores and fuel rods is enough of a nightmare that no sane person should consider moving forward with commercial nuclear power plants. And in the US anyway, no one is.

 

In January 2008, the UK government gave the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations to be built.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Policy_of_the_Labour_Government

Gordon Brown today welcomed proposals for a new nuclear power station at Sellafield as he made a visit to the site.
The prime minister's trip to the site came after the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) announced its willingness to provide land for the building of two nuclear stations on land adjacent to Sellafield.
The NDA – which owns the site, near the village of Seascale, in west Cumbria, and rural land around it – expects any new nuclear power stations to be built by a commercial organisation.
Brown also met community leaders and backed the nuclear power industry.
"I think today's announcement is great news for Sellafield and good news for British nuclear industries," he said.
"We are building a new range of nuclear power stations. Sellafield has got a great history ... it's also got a great future."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/23/sellafield-nuclear-gordon-brown

Legacy nuclear issues

Office for Nuclear Development


http://www.decc.gov.uk/EN/Search.aspx?Search=nuclear&AllWords=True&PageNumber=1&ResultsOnPage=10

The International Energy Agency estimates we must build 32 nuclear reactors globally every year if we are to halve emissions by 2050.
So however we look at it we will not secure the supply of sustainable energy on which the future of our planet depends without a role for civil nuclear power. We simply cannot avoid the real and pressing challenge that presents, from the safety and security of fissile material to the handling of waste, a comprehensive multilateral strategy to allow nations safe and secure access to civil nuclear power is essential.
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18631

Europe Supports Geological Disposal
http://www.nda.gov.uk/stakeholders/newsletter/europesupportsgdf.cfm

Cost.
?

 

Well, nuclear power does reduce greenhouse emissions.

But for the British government to consider it acceptable to substitute nuclear waste for greenhouse emissions is terribly short-sighted and tragic.

 

I can imagine them saying just that at a No. 10 policy meeting.

To be fair, I'm not diametrically apposed to nuclear power, I just find it horrendously too expensive.
However, it doesn't seem to not be in our (the general public) hands any longer.
It terribly long sighted of them, IMHO, as it won't really be their problem in the distant future.
They just need to make it sound acceptable now.

 

Where does the UK store its nuclear waste? Being a smaller country with much less useless land, I would think this issue would be a much tougher problem for you guys.

 

Mark my words, if nuclear power presses ahead despite the lack of an acceptable waste storage solution, it will be the neighborhoods of poor people that will be most at risk. The rich will not expose their families to the increased cancer risk.

 

How would the poor be at risk? They're not going to store radioactive waste anywhere near cities.

 

Does Britain have any colonies left? Just thinking out loud ...

The only other possibility I can think of would be some sort of deep-ocean storage. I would predict, though, that before these proposed plants get anywhere close to going online, public opinion will be raging against them. People get riled about nuclear power, even if their reasons aren't always technically correct.

 

:smilielol5:

ZW

 

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

 

Here:
http://www.sellafieldsites.com/what-we-do http://www.nda.gov.uk/sites/

Radioactive Waste and its Management
Key organisations
The wastes
Interim storage
Geological disposal
The regulatory framework
Experience in other countries
Role of international orgainisations

I keep reading about "geological disposal."

21 December 2009

"Although it is probably many years before a site is selected, we are carrying out preparatory work to support our approach to nuclear safety and environmental management such as conducting research on how a geological disposal facility could be developed.

Broadly speaking, UK geology is well mapped out and we can identify potential host areas with desirable geological characteristics for the repository sites. Such characteristics include physical stability and predictable hydrogeology. It has been estimated that more than 30% of the UK has geological characteristics that would be suitable for a repository.
Geology aside, there are likely to be other issues not directly related to the geology such as transportation issues related to moving the waste to the site. To identify a suitable location for a UK repository the workshop agreed that government will need to apply rigorous criteria that are developed in close consultation with stakeholders"
http://www.rsc.org/ScienceAndTechnology/Policy/Bulletins/Issue6/Nuclearwaste.asp

So, more than likely, under my house

 

Yikes! That's a lot of sites!

 

A lot of the sites aren't permanent sites for storage, though.
I think the ultimate goal is to put all historic stockpiles in one place - approx 10km deep in the ground somewhere.

 

Nuclear power is just a result of this mindset we have where everything worth dealing with now is just being put off til it actually becomes a threat. I don't know much about nuclear power in specific, but I know it pollutes us quite extensively and that's enough for it to fall into this category.

 

What in particular is being "put off"?

What did you want to know?

 

Finding a safer alternative, that doesn't harm the environment, pretty much is what I was implying.

Nothing really. I know it makes up for a lot of pollution though, and as a pollutant will ultimately malfunction the earth in one form or another, may be 50 or 500 years from now but the truth is we're expanding and slowly filling the Earth with more shit as our race expands. This being one of them.

So yeah, I guess that's what I'm leading to when I say things are being "put off".

 

Like?
Personally I think it's safe.
Safe enough to not overly concern myself about it.
I'm not quite sure there are any alternatives that don't harm the environment in one way or another.

Well, coal makes up most of the pollution here in the UK.
Coal, oil then - a long way down - nuclear.
We can't really know what the world will be like in 500 years time.

I understand you concerns, though.

 

Yeah, comes down to that, so "Like" what. Lol. I wonder if shipping off waste into space will be the solution one day, after all there's an infinite amount of room else where? Huh?! Or maybe we can just obliterate the stuff. That's all I can really think of, and nothing I can accomplish on my own, lol. I know that only really applies to the effect of nuclear products/waste and not the cause though. Who knows how we could replace so many forms of power, solar energy can't do it all, I don't think.

We sure can't, but I do feel it's screwy that we're leaving the greater concerns to the people ahead of us.

 

It wouldn't be beyond reason (one day) to either ship it off into space or just completely obliterate the stuff.
More likely it will be stored deeper and deeper in the ground.
Cheaper and easier.

As long as we have so much coal, that will be the major source of energy the world will use, IMHO (86.4%). So pretty much anything that can replace that (including nuclear) is going to be a hell of lot better for the environ'..

Kinda true.
But the way we will leave it will be able to be left if nothing better is found.
It's not like the waste is being dropped down old mines by blind men.

 

This is the attitude we need to avoid. I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but saying, in effect, "I don't know anything about it, I just know it's bad" doesn't really lead to a reasoned solution.

Nuclear power doesn't make "a lot of pollution". Almost none, in fact. Certainly not of the magnitude that comes out of coal or oil-fired plants. During operation, coal-fired plants actually put more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants do, because of the radioactive carbon-14 in the coal. Breathing the gunk coming out the exhaust stacks of a coal plant gives you more roentgens of exposure than working in a nuclear plant does.

Even the issue of nuclear waste is misleading. By definition, everything that comes out of a nuclear plant is considered "nuclear waste", from the booties and things the workers wear right up to the spent fuel rods. Most of that stuff is inconsquential, no more radioactive than ordinary rocks. It's the spent fuel that creates the problem.

Spent nuclear fuel is intensely radioactive and stays that way for a long, long time. And that's the problem. What the hell do you do with that stuff? To date, there's no really acceptable answer to that question.

If nothing ever went wrong, the "geological" solution mentioned above might be acceptable. But things do go wrong, from earthquakes to transport accidents to terrorists stealing it.

In my mind, spent reactor cores are so bad that I don't see the point of continuing to fool with them. Why not put all that money into solar, wind, tides, geothermal? Those solutions aren't perfect ... nothing is ... but compared to the problem of spent reactor cores, their drawbacks are a drop in the bucket.