16 Oct
Does anyone think Nuclear energy is a good idea?
I know it does not produce green house gases.
But it does produce nuclear waste. And after 40 years of producing nuclear waste we still do not have a place to store it for the next 40,000 years that it will take to degrade into something non-toxic. Lets get real here.
Don’t you think it would be awefully short sighted of us to push waste on countless generations of our ancestors just so we are "comfortable". I think it would be better if we bit the bullet now and stopped driving SUV’s to work and leaving our air conditioners on so our house is comfortable when we get home.
Posted by pierre c on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
true …
but it’s the best we have right now ..
Posted by Madre Sicilia on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Professor James Lovelock does, read his book, The Revenge of Gaia
Posted by John M on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
it has pluses and minuses, just like the rest of our options right now.
Posted by bloodshotcyclops on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
its probably our only hope in the short term.
Posted by speakeasy on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
I prefer the Bush energy plan - geothermal energy to produce electricity and hydrogen. No carbon involved.
Posted by IslaVistaLife on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
We need to divert like $100 billion towards a rail gun that can shoot toxic waste into space at 7 km/second
Posted by The Mentor on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
I am sure they will come up with something to deradioactivate it in the next 40,000 years, in the meantime, if you are on the Global Warming side we wont have a (habital) planet in 40,000 years if we continue to use coal fire plants.
Posted by CRSP on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Its good, Check out the new nuke site proposals. You get real. Uranium encapsulated in Graphite have a half life that is 100,000 years more than uranium, when it can leak the uranium is inert. It can’t leak!!!
Posted by Tammi D on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
the government keeps building new mobile nuclear plants but we can’t have more fixed site stations for commercial power production. what nonsense. why so concerned about the next 40,000 years — isn’t the global warming crowd telling us catastrophe is much nearer?
Posted by Hoosier Daddy on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
It’s a MUCH better idea than fossil fuel, if we stopped being so stupid and wasteful with our implementation of nuclear power. Right now, we use it in almost the stupidest way possible. All we do is pile up fissionable material and boil water with it! That’s it! What could be stupider? There are far more efficient ways to derive useful energy from ionizing radiation and high-energy electron emission.
As for nuclear waste, we’re taking a lazy approach to it, too. It could be dealt with better, but it’s easier to just bundle it all up and bury it.
Posted by lunatic on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
The only reason we do not have a place to store our nuclear waste (like many other countries have been doing for decades) is that we do not have the political will to do so.
Radioactive waste exists and needs to be disposed of properly. Right now it is stored all over the country in temporary pools or casks that were not designed to hold it indefinitely and cost a boatload to manage and protect. Once the government makes the decision to store it properly, as they should have done 20 years ago, the argument for not knowing what to do with radioactive waste goes away.
OBTW. If you are concerned about transporting radioactive waste, please don’t be. The US has been transporting high and low level nuclear waste for 50 years without incident.
Hey, if you want to solve 2 problems at once, we can line the northern and southern borders of the US with the radioactive waste and also solve our illegal alien problem at the same time.
Posted by Darth Kreia on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Nope.
It might be clean, but where do we store the nuclear waste that it leaves behind? It takes so long to decompose, that we need a place to store it where either no one will find it, or there will be a sign that anything that lives on this planet (or what’s left of it) in around 40,000 years. Until we find out how to do that i don’t think it should be used. What about melt downs? Think about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. People are still suffering form the effects of Chernobyl and the radiation that is left in the atmosphere is still effecting the whole world. Until we can control it and find better ways to store the waste, i think it should not be used.
Posted by wayfaroutthere on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
It has it’s problems, the biggest of which is nuclear proliferation–a country gets half a nuclear bomb when they get a power plant, and has to figure out how to get enriched uranium and figure out the other half of the bomb to get one. It would be a lot easier to keep track of who is making bombs if there were fewer countries who had any business messing with any kind of nukes.
I’m not going to weigh in on the clean/dirty argument, when nuclear plants work right they are the cleanest, and when they don’t they are the dirtiest. Either way, it is the most expensive way to boil water we have decided to use to make power on a large scale. (After saying that, note that solar and a few other methods are still so expensive no one has attempted them on a large scale yet).
I don’t think we should spread that technology around to countries that don’t have it. It still needs work (maybe someday we’ll get fusion reactors and get rid of the spent fuel problem today’s fission reactors have). But I can’t use the environment as my main argument–the realistic alternatives are coal and oil. Renewable ethanol has caused other short-term problems, but technology and intellegence should straigten those out fairly well in about a decade. Solar and geothermal technology needs to be improved to be practical, but we are a lot closer to that than we are to fission.
To sum it up, we need to keep looking at alternative energy for the future, without getting hung up on outdated or fantastical visions of the problems and benefits. We have to keep trying to develop all of them–make coal cleaner, make ethanol from cellulose rather than food, improve the way we use oil and nuclear power, and keep working on the windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels until using them makes fiscal sense. We can do it, if we don’t swear our loyalty to a particular method of creating electricity.
Posted by Nickel Johann on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
It is just one measure out of 30 possible…
20 types of electricity generation have been almost not deployed or even researched, all of them renewables.
Nuclear received a huge amount of money for the research which wind power will never ever get… and still the new production capacity for wind installed per year is about to overtake nuclear..
Posted by jim z on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
It is short-sightedness such as your question indicates that pushed us into greater dependance on oil and greater depedance on FOREIGN OIL. You suggest that we don’t have a place to store it. That is nonsense. There are plenty of places to store it but like landfills, noone wants it in their backyard. We owe the next generations to treat the waste responsibly but it can be done. All the nuclear wastes could be stored in a very small area. As a geologist, I could come up with some relatively safe places.
Posted by Ben O on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
It really depends on whether you think nuclear weapons are a good idea - which is a complicated issue in itself.
I think the disposal of nuclear waste is a technical problem with a technological solution. There are places deep within the earth that have been stable for millions of years, suitable for nuclear waste storage and it is possible to build containers to keep radioactive material in that will be stable for very long periods.
Nuclear waste degrades in radioactivity over a relatively short time frame. Chernobyl will suposedly be completely inhabitable without detectable background radiation in around 300 years. Time frames around 40000 years are quite conservative (ie responsible) strategies to purge virtually all radioactive traces.
Posted by Sci on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
With technology currently in use, it probably isn’t a good idea. But there is a way of generating nuclear energy, called a breeder reactor that consumes a much higher percentage of uranium, and generates waste that must be stored for much shorter periods (hundreds instead of thousands of years). This could be a useful way to buy time to develop technologies to use truly renewable energy sources. It must be stressed that even nuclear power will not last forever, so eventually we will have to go to renewable (they say fusion could be used indefinitely, but no one has made it work on a practical level yet).
Posted by Jakal on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
its better to use nuclear energy. Man is a creature with lot of thinking power. So before much time we will find a solutin for this problem
Posted by acidman1968 on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
The biggest problem with nuclear energy is public ignorance. Too many people hear the word "nuclear" and the first thing that pops into their heads is the image of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima…
Posted by Gaberille on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Good Idea. i am pretty sure that someone will find a way to get rid of it.
Posted by willow on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
No. I think it’s a really bad idea. The only reason we are being fed all this global warming boll*cks is because the government want to get into nuclear energy for money reasons. The governments Biggest concern is the economy, they couldn’t give a toss whether the earth is warming or cooling.
Posted by The Voice of Reason on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Absolutely, it is the only real way to gain significant reductions in CO2 emissions. If you are truly concerned with man made green house gases, you should be marching in the streets demanding nuclear power now.
The waste does not need to be stored, it can be reprocessed to produce more nuclear fuel, this is what they do in France, where 80% of the electrical power is generated using nuclear power.
Of course if like most of the so called environmentalists out there, your true agenda is the advancement of a socialist or liberal political agenda, you would not want nuclear power.
Posted by knight_in_burntarmor on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Were Nuclear power really needed, I would say yes. It’s no longer a necessity however.
On my little farm I use a little generator that attaches to a two inch water line. It produces enough electricity to cut my power costs better than 60%. The next generation will do better.
Canadian companies have solar generation systems that end dependency on utility companies. The smart home owner can combine hydro generators and solar generation and stop buying electricity all together. We no longer need nuclear generated electricity.
We have existing alternatives. There is no need for nuclear or coal generation. Those days are gone.
Posted by Dr. Blob on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
Tough question. If you look at it from a security standpoint, maintaining what we have so we don’t descend into chaos, it’s very attractive.
There are proposals for breeder reactors and reprocessing that could produce all the power we need for 10,000 years.
But from a bigger perspective, the drawbacks are huge. Uranium mining, water diversion, waste disposal, the mess created by the whole industrial infrastructure, securing the nuclear materials from rogue parties, waste disposal.
Not that these hurdles are insurmountable, but that we have a history of doing a bad job of addressing them. Anything run by people is subject to human failure.
Why don’t we start on the path to a decentralized, environmentally benign (as much as humanly possible) energy strategy today -
rather than go down the path of another huge government / bureaucratic / industrial complex boondoggle?
Posted by sami-joe on 16.10.09 at 12:23 pm
well by the time something should be done about it we will be drinking it. they have to place it somewhere and they tend to do that in small undeveloped areas such as places in Africa.