What's your opinion on nuclear energy?

[Reclusiarch Grimaldus]

Comet Cracker

What about this one?

Huh... That's a pretty interesting idea.

Hopefully it'll work as promised.

[zz1000zz]

So Kaz-Balan, your answer to my question is, "No"?

[Layra-chan]

There's no real good way to deal with nuclear waste. The three main ideas are either stick it in barrels and guard it, stick it in barrels and stick the barrels underground, and stick it in barrels and jettison them into space.

The last idea is nixed because we have enough junk in orbit already, in a "extremely dangerous to things going into space" kind of way.
The second idea requires that wherever we stick it will suffer no natural disasters of the earth-shaking kind ever. No earthquakes, landslides, minefields, heavy vehicles, construction work, etc, nothing that could make part of the ceiling or walls fall down and bash open one or more of the barrels. Also, we'd damn well hope that the place is bone dry otherwise we'll have to deal with oxidation.
The first idea requires rather consistent guarding for a very long time, longer than any given civilization is expected to last. So when your country gets ransacked by the Visgoths, are you going to tell them "okay, steal all the loot, burn down the cities, kill all the men and enslave the women and children but make sure that nobody touches those barrels"?

In other words, nobody has given a solid plan for dealing with nuclear waste. This won't stop people from doing it, it just makes it a not-so-great idea.

I'm still in favor of the "pave Nevada with solar cells" idea. There's a lot of the Southwest that nobody is using and enough sunlight that even at only 10% efficiency we can power at least Western Civ. on solar alone as long as our energy consumption doesn't rise more than linearly. And we don't get the problem of nuclear waste and possible sources of weapons-grade plutonium as side-effects. Everybody wins! Except maybe Nevada.

[zz1000zz]

Layra-chan

There's no real good way to deal with nuclear waste. The three main ideas are either stick it in barrels and guard it, stick it in barrels and stick the barrels underground, and stick it in barrels and jettison them into space.

There are also sea-based options. For example, burying nuclear waste in subduction zones could be a viable solution, as it would send the waste to the Earth's core. Like the rest of the options, there is no real plan as to how sea-based solutions would be implemented.

Layra-chan

I'm still in favor of the "pave Nevada with solar cells" idea. There's a lot of the Southwest that nobody is using and enough sunlight that even at only 10% efficiency we can power at least Western Civ. on solar alone as long as our energy consumption doesn't rise more than linearly. And we don't get the problem of nuclear waste and possible sources of weapons-grade plutonium as side-effects. Everybody wins! Except maybe Nevada.

This would be a poor idea currently, given the youth of solar technology. Once the technology has matured more, this may be more attractive. It would be a bad solution to cover Nevada in solar panels now, if in ten years we will have much better ones we could install.

Kaz-Balan

My answer to your question was...

A non-answer. I asked how the problem of nuclear waste would be considered infinitesimal. You responded with some vague, unsubstantiated and informationless post about how other options were worse. You did not provide any meaningful information, such as scope and scale of the various problems. In fact, you did not provide anything.

Your post amounted to nothing more than a long-winded version of, "It is, because I say it is."

[Requiem in Mortis]

The only true problem I can see with nuclear power is the cost of the plants. Most of the arguments against nuclear power don't have that much merit.

The waste doesn't actually have to be buried. France, in one of the few moves they've ever made that I like, actually recycles their nuclear waste back into usable fuel. I don't know the actual process, but after two to five years, 96% of the waste can be turned back into usable fuel. The other 4% is buried on-site.

As for the argument about the risk of a meltdown, think about this; in fifty years of nuclear power, there have been exactly ten meltdowns. Only two, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were serious, and out of those two, only Chernobyl was a disaster- and it was a combination of human error and crappy Soviet technology. You're more likely to die in a plane crash than experience a nuclear meltdown.

Another argument is that terrorists might set explosive charges, or fly a plane into the reactor. Nuclear plants are easily one of the most, if not THE most civilian/ commercial facilities in the United States, and possibly the world. It would be very hard for someone to sneak into a plant, and going near the reactor when it's active is a very bad idea. Also, your average American reactor is surrounded by three or more feet of ferroconcrete (steel-reinforced concrete) and lead. An airplane would bounce off the casing. You'd need a bunker-buster to crack open a nut like that, and your average terrorists don't have that kind of money.

Finally, Patrick Moore, one of the founding members of Greenpeace, is now a supporter of nuclear power after seeing the beneficial effects of nuclear medicine.

[Layra-chan]

Erm, you can't keep recycling the fuel indefinitely. You stick a mix of uranium 238 and 235 in, you get a mix of uranium 238 and plutonium out. You do some very careful security work to keep the plutonium out of the hands of arms smugglers, and you stick a mix of uranium 238 and plutonium in. You get uranium 238 and unusable junk out.
Unless you're willing to waste just as much energy as you're going to get out, you can't turn uranium 238 into uranium 235, and while there is a process to turn uranium 238 into plutonium, you can't turn the waste products from plutonium into useful material, and they're still toxic. So again we have the "how do we get rid of this stuff?" question.
Dumping it into the ocean might work, although we don't want it coming back up through underwater geothermal vents.

As for the youth of solar technology, yeah, solar technology is young. Most of it sucks, its expensive, and no politician would ever vote for it. But even given how unwieldy and inefficient it is, current solar technology could still solve the entire energy crisis (at least in terms of production) and make up its own costs within a few years.
Will it be better in ten years? Of course it will. But more importantly, it could be done now (and thus could be done better in ten years). So it's a matter of how much opportunity cost we lose by doing it now versus how much it costs to deal with generating the energy we use over the next ten years. I'm not good at economics, so I can't answer this question. But if you ask again in ten years, paving Nevada with solar cells will still be a pretty good idea.

[zz1000zz]

Layra-chan

As for the youth of solar technology, yeah, solar technology is young. Most of it sucks, its expensive, and no politician would ever vote for it. But even given how unwieldy and inefficient it is, current solar technology could still solve the entire energy crisis (at least in terms of production) and make up its own costs within a few years.

While I have heard bold claims to this end, I really haven't seen anything supporting it. I would be interested to know the total cost of covering Nevada in solar panels. It is not just the cost of installing solar panels which would need to be considered, but also the cost of building the infrastructure to be able to transport the electricity and the cost to maintain the system.

Perhaps someone has done a full workup on the costs of this, but if so I have never seen it.

[Layra-chan]

Hmm. Actually, yeah, distribution would be problematic. Maintenance shouldn't be too much higher than the cost of maintaining any equivalent power source, but if all the panels are in Nevada then distribution could be a bit of a hassle.

[zz1000zz]

I honestly have no idea what it would cost to maintain or build a system like that. Given the amount of area which would be covered in solar panels, I wouldn't be surprised if maintaining it was more costly than other alternatives. At the same time, solar panels are known to last for a few decades, so perhaps it would cost less. Of course, you have to figure out how much you let the solar panels degrade before replacing them, as the power output would drop over time.

With how massive an undertaking this solution would be, I expect there would be all sorts of logistical problems. If I was the one making the decision, it would take a lot of convincing to make me believe it was a good solution.

[areyousrs]

I'm not that educated on this subject, but despite the fact it's supposed to be safe or whatever I would feel a lot better of we were using another source of energy. I don't want a repeat of Chernobyl or Mayak. Plus, with all these nuclear weapons and whatnot in production - ugh, I wish they would disappear off the planet as well.

[Shokushu]

After I found out that people living near coal plants get a higher dose of radiation than people living next to fission reactors there just hasn't been a convincing argument against nuclear power for me.

[zz1000zz]

Shokushu

After I found out that people living near coal plants get a higher dose of radiation than people living next to fission reactors there just hasn't been a convincing argument against nuclear power for me.

What are your thoughts on nuclear waste disposal then?

[Layra-chan]

Shokushu

After I found out that people living near coal plants get a higher dose of radiation than people living next to fission reactors there just hasn't been a convincing argument against nuclear power for me.

Nuclear plants themselves are usually fairly well insulated; after all, if the radiation were escaping then the plant is losing a lot of the energy it's supposed to be harnessing.

It's the stuff left over after the fusion that's the problem. Well, also the risk of meltdown, but mainly the nuclear waste. Accidentally processed uranium-238 turns into weapons-grade plutonium, and the end results of uranium-235 processing, krypton and barium, are very toxic; the results of plutonium fission aren't any better. Plutonium itself is extremely toxic and highly flammable. There's also the various reactor poisons, that can't be fed back into the reactor the way plutonium can.
So even though there's little danger when the material is in the plant, as soon as it leaves it becomes much more dangerous per volume than anything coal plants produce.