HeyBub said:
Greg G. wrote:
That puts the onus on science to come up with either a way to
deal with nuclear by-products or figure a way to break the covalent
bonds of water for hydrogen. Until some concrete promise in these
areas is shown, it would be arrogant of us to ignore the possibility
that we won't come up with that next step in the evolution of energy.
Not trying to be negative, just careful. (And argumentative...) ;-)
You raise the point often made by the anti-nuclear crowd - We don't have a
plan to deal with nuclear waste.
Not a good long term plan for material with a half-life of 713 million
years. There is somewhere around 60,000 metric tons of the ****, and
we still have no plans for dealing with it long term. We import 85% of
the uranium used - 42% from those crazy Canuckistanians alone - and
fuel imports fostered a $370 million trade deficit in 2000 alone.
But we have several plans:
* Shoot the **** into the sun
I've argued that for years - what better place? The cost factor at
this point makes it prohibitive. Same as collecting He3 from the moon.
Where there's a will, and a profit, however...
* Encapsulate it in molten glass and sink it in the Mariannas Trench
The French do it. Expensive and not my favorite but better than what
we are currently doing which is allowing much of it to stand inside
the plants in shallow steel wells. Talk about a security risk...
* Mix it with liquid concrete and inject it into a salt dome
And then turn it into an Indian reservation. :-o
( Uranium tailings in the west.)
Again better than the current method.
* Sell it to China as a building material
Turn about's fair play. But seriously...
* Other
The fact is, we haven't done any of these things because we don't have to.
There is no compelling need to take any action regarding nuclear waste and
the longer we wait the greater the chance an even better solution will be
found.
The same could be argued for the plants themselves. Most were one-off
designs, modern inexpensive microprocessors and monitoring equipment
were either in their infancy or just around the corner. Huge cost
overruns during construction, marginal designs, short life spans,
expense of decommission, and public outcry over Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl all spelled the death of reactors build in the 60s and 70s.
And none have been slated since, while existing plants fell dormant.
I kept hoping for some positive results from the Tokamak fusion
reactors, but that fizzled - I think the Russians got one to ~10%
efficiency before dropping the project as not cost effective.
I don't mind that we stopped development at that time, but with
advancing electronics, CAD and simulators, new research and
standardized designs that could be implemented at lower costs, it may
well be time to reconsider investing in development of a new age of
nuclear plants. Preferably something which produces waste with a much
shorter half-life however. Science has yet to produce a solution.
Coal is a nasty material to mine and burn, and cleaning the exhaust of
sulfur dioxide, mercury and particulates is marginal and expensive.
And as the TVA ash disaster of last year proves, no existing
technology is completely immune from waste disposal problems:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnJUSHpTm-E
After a 60 year history of 97% approval rates from local residents and
customers, gross mismanagement allowed the accumulation of this crap
in a retention "pond." 1 Billion gallons of toxic sludge (5.3 million
cubic yards of coal ash) flooded neighboring communities and ran
downstream to adjoining waterways. Nice!
(I can't believe no one mentioned this event in earlier discussions of
the TVA - did no one notice or did Santa bump it off the mainstream
news? I waited and waited...)
It would be a pity to dump the all the crud in the ocean, then find out next
year we could use it to cheaply convert water to Hydrogen.
I wouldn't hold my breath - unless near the stack of a 30 year old
reactor or coal plant. ;-)
Greg G.