On Nov 11, 1:00*pm, Greg wrote:
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.

If it has a half-life of 713M years, we don't need to do anything with
it. It's not at all dangerous. It's the short-lived isotopes that
will kill. Danger from radioactivity is (more or less) inversely
proportional to half-life.


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...

For half the cost of sending it into the sun, it could be sent into an
escape trajectory. Look how much money the Demonicrats could save!

* 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...

Blame the Demonicrats.

* 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...

They'd just make kid's toys for McDonalds out of it and send it back.

* 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

It's my understanding that digital controls specifically not allowed.

overruns during construction, marginal designs, short life spans,

Unions.

expense of decommission, and public outcry over Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl all spelled the death of reactors build in the 60s and 70s.

They were dead in the US *long* before Chernobyl, and they're not dead
anywhere else, so that's a red herring.

And none have been slated since, while existing plants fell dormant.

How about the decommissioning of Shoreham. There was another
government boondoggle. Let it go hot, generate zero power, then pay
billion$ to shut it down.

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.

Not going to happen.

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.

Shorter half-life == hotter. There are all sorts of *good*
alternatives, but the better the alternative the more politically
incorrect it is. The problem isn't energy, it's politics.

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:

....and only a small part of the problem. Coal plants put out a few
thousand times the radioactivity into the environment than a nuke
plant does.

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.