Fascinating that an article with so much detailed information doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely for [checks notes] 10,000 years.
One of USA's deserts is around 190,000 square miles.
I'm sure we can find someplace to store it all.
Don't forget that there are already nuclear waste sites that are managed by the government. It's just a small operational cost for today's governments.
There doesn't seem to be a believe that governments will be around for 10000 years to keep this managed securely. But honestly, if society deteriorates to the point it can no longer organize a government, a few highly radioactive spots on earth are not going to be a huge deal.
Nuclear waste facilities also have nice economies of scale in the sense that a single site's incremental cost of storing an additional ton of nuclear waste is negligible. So unlike global warming, you're not saddling the future generations up with a massive bill.
If it were actually a problem, someone would have to do something about it. The volumes are so small they can simply be stored in an ad-hoc matter.
It is a mystery why people get so fixated on the waste. It is very hard to articulate a problem apart from the fact that it goes away eventually (unlike most waste which sits there pretty much forever). We produce a lot of dangerous substances; nuclear waste isn't the worst of them.
https://www.gao.gov/mobile/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_...
Once you look at waste, most of nuclear waste is not 'waste', and some countries like france and Russia use chemical reprocessing to separate long lives waste from unburnt fuel. That gives a further >90% reduction.
What you are left with is a small amount of High level waste, that can be stored in deep repositories like sweeden is doing. That's a permanent solution, because we know that bedrock has not moved for 10s of millions of years.
Is there something in the tone of my comment you are unhappy about?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/TCWrO7OFt4I/AAAAAAAAIF...
Had we voted republican across the board in the 1960s we could have solved climate change without ever talking about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace
Many Australian farmers who lease their land to electricity companies for use as solar farms run sheep on those same solar farms.
Since the solar panels track the sun, grass grows under them and sheep being small enough to fit under the panels are perfect at keeping that grass under control.
So the farmer actually gets two incomes from the one field.
Really? Such tracking systems do exist, but outside of CSP they are generally not economic. I would be surprised if many PV solar plants in Australia use tracking motors.
Not to say grass won't grow under static panels. I have no idea about that.
My own personal view is that the threat from global warming is worse than the threat of nuclear waste buildup. This is why I usually comment that we should ban burning fossil fuels for power generation and then first afterward start the discussion on how we want to create the energy grid of the future. Nuclear waste is a very relevant topic once we got to the point that we agree that burning fossil fuels has to stop and we decided which day the fossil fueled power plants must shut down.
Uranium 238 is unused fuel.
Coal, oil, natural gas waste sit in the air you breath and in pools or dumps on land. Plus there is the CO2.
Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear. Cement and steel generate pollution and CO2 in their production.
I'd be interested in a reference for this. My intuition goes like this:
I can see wind using a lot of steel and cement for the towers (though masts built incorporating other materials do exist) and solar using just a small amount of cement and steel -- but solar doesn't produce much power for the same area compared to a nuclear power plant, so I can see that amounting to a lot of steel and cement if you build a bunch of solar in the same way you'd build nuclear power plants.
However, solar power plants and some wind power are often not far away from where the power will be used, which means that less steel is used for the electrical masts and power lines. And solar is often mounted on roofs, which means that very little structural cement is needed.
Plus... while the article says that solar and wind power needs to be replaced every 20-25 years (note: there are turbines in operation that are older than that), when you replace a wind turbine, you'll often keep the tower and just replace the turbine on the top, so it's not like you need to scrap the whole thing every 20-25 years.
> a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth's crust averaging about 2,550 km long and 69 km wide.
It's still better for humans and the environment than burning fossil fuels (and arguably better than solar/wind).
And, while people talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, they never talk about coal fires that have been burning for decades in places like Centralia and Xinjian--which are WAY worse than all of our nuclear disasters.
Let's be clear: the claim that burning coal releases radioactive sulfur and carbon is wrong. There are radioactive materials released, but they are from contaminants like uranium and its decay products.
There's so much of it going on that you have to wonder whether the author is aware of this. I.e. is this an intentionally misleading article written to green wash highly lucrative government spending on new nuclear plants? Without this spending no nuclear plants get built. Just a theory but this article looks a lot like it is written with this kind of agenda in mind.
Right, so French nuclear waste is given to private shipping companies who take it to Somalia and dump it just off the shore there.
The rise of Somalian "piracy" 30 years ago was due to villagers tired of the poison washing up on shore and so they would take rafts out to ships to inspect them, as is their right as an impromptu but only existing coast guard.