[tibarun]

Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia? You do realize that you can't actually guarantee what will happen in 10, 20... 50 years time. Earthquakes, Tsunamis, tornados, terrorist attacks, wars, neglect, malfunction, human error... How can you guarantee that a certain place is safe to store millions of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years if we can't even guarantee what will happen tomorrow? We need to stop this nuclear madness!

[electricEmu]

Well, damming rivers turned out to be a bad idea in cases so (Washington State)[https://relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/publ...] is undoing them. Wind turbines require surmounting large technical hurdles with storing energy. Solar takes a lot of resources/space. Heck, in 50 years we might be in a dust bowl and solar doesn't even work.

Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal? Why not push for using a different type of fuel instead?

I didn't grow up during the nuclear scare times. Fukushima wasn't great, but it wasn't so horrific either. If it gets us off coal and natural gas then I'm down.

[mikelyons]

Fukushima isn't over, we don't know what it will have done in the next 50 years yet.

[coldtea]

>Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal?

He already answered that: because not all options are appropriate.

[opo]

>Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

>... How can you guarantee that a certain place is safe to store millions of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years if we can't even guarantee what will happen tomorrow?

Millions of tons? Where are you getting that number from? Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"

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

The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

>...We need to stop this nuclear madness!

NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

As someone in a previous discussion pointed out, the historical record for deaths from nuclear power have been very low:

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

[luca_ing]

>> Can we focus on renewables and stop trying to sell people hazardous waste that can last for millenia?

> No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is a reasonable replacement for base load power. This comic illustrates the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

The comic is a bit disingenious as it implies that all renewables are intermittent.

But many renewable energy sources are base load as well, e.g. hydro or wind. Yes, they have variations, but so does the load -- from the perspective of power grid management there's nothing new.

In fact this is part of the problem: renewables and nuclear (or coal) are competing for base load. If we build a nuclear plant, we need to run it for 50 years for the investment to make sense. This means that it will economically and politically impede the installation of e.g. wind power for 50 years.

[tibarun]

"The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in the current fiscal year, about $1.5 billion of that going to the management and treatment of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in underground storage tanks." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/0...

Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it. Even with a fleet of such fast reactors, nations would nonetheless require an ultimate home for radioactive waste, one reason that a 2010 M.I.T. report on spent nuclear fuel dismissed such fast reactors. Or, as Cochran puts it: "If you want to get rid of milk, don't feed it to cows."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-reactors-to-...

"Do the math! 1.1 additional GT out of 36 GT emitted is only a 3% difference. This 3% value is not a typographical error. Worldwide, all those nukes made only a 3% dent in yearly CO2 production. Put another way, each of the 438 individual nuclear plants contribute less than seven thousandths of one percent to CO2 reduction[18]. That’s hardly enough to justify claims that keeping your old local nuke running is necessary to prevent the sea from rising."

http://www.fairewinds.org/demystify//demystifying-nuclear-po...