Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace stands up and says nuclear (or "nuculer" for all you intentionally illiterate ones) energy is needed to replace fossil fuels. The thud you just heard is all the Greenpeace members' jaws hitting the floor at the same time. Word is , he's interviewing bodyguards today and can't be reached for comment.

Good job, Patrick!

http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dl.../1002/BUSINESS

One of the problems with nuclear energy is, what you do with the waste. No one wants it. LAst I remember the government was drilling a hole in the Rockies some 200 miles deep and burying it. I think anyway.

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"A theory that explains everything, explains nothing"

Last-minute glitches in Yucca nuclear-waste burial plan

New findings could scuttle idea for underground site

Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, November 17, 2003

By 2010, if the U.S. Energy Department gets its way, then an underground burial site for spent nuclear reactor fuel would open for business,

thousands of feet beneath the Nevada desert.

But chemists' new findings raise questions about plans for the repository at Yucca Mountain, just northeast of Las Vegas -- and at a very bad time, only 13 months before the agency plans to ask for federal nuclear regulators' approval to build the site.

During the past year, two DOE-funded scientific teams have discovered that the buried fuel rods could experience unexpected chemical changes. Those changes could alter present estimates of how fast the buried fuel rods would disintegrate, leaking poisonous plutonium, neptunium, iodine and other radionuclides into the surrounding terrain and groundwater.



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...L&type=science

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"A theory that explains everything, explains nothing"

Waste disposal's not so much of a technical problem, it's a matter of economics. America uses a once-through nuclear fuel cycle. They mine the uranium, enrich it, run it through the reactor, and then dispose of the spent uranium (U-238) together with the produced plutonium (Pu-239). Because the US has a good supply of uranium, it's cheaper to do it this way instead of re-cycling the fuel as other countries do, even though what other countries do is much, much more environmentally friendly.

In some other parts of the world, they at least use a plutonium nuclear fuel cycle. Once the fuel has gone through the reactor, the U-238 and Pu-239 are seperated and reused (they can be turned into something called MOX fuel, which works in ordinary light water reactors). Some countries are even starting to use something called a minor actinide cycle to use the minor actinides produced in a normal thermal reactor (minor actinides are things like americium, curium, fermium, and californium). By using fuel to it's full potential, it's possible to produce very little waste, and the waste that is produced would be much less radioactive than the stuff they're storing in shallow pools now.

These things cost money to implement, but it's definately possible to use nuclear power in a responsible way. In fact, it might be our only choice.

It's about weighing things out in the balance that matters. If we can trade off the harm caused by fossil fuel combustion vs the known harm or even the worst-case scenario of Nukes, I believe that nukes would come out far ahead in terms of safety and pollution of the environment. Just like I'd trade the bucolic views of Nantucket Sound for windmills that would replace plants nearby like the Breighton Point coal/oil hybrid plant.

Well it's nice to see Greenpeace catch up to where I was politically 20 years ago. I am sure that 20 years from now they will catch up to where I currently stand today.

More people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in all the nucular accidents in American history.

Yucca Mountain. I remember seeing a great 60 Minutes piece on that. It's an idea that makes a lot of sense... instead of having nucular waste scattered throughout the country, make one big huge honkin' ultra-secure location to put it all. But all sorts of problems are cropping up, none the least of which is the logistics of safely transporting the waste.

Why don't you write a book to help them along? I'm sure if they only knew you they'd want to be just like you.

Now now, don't be ignorant of history here. Plenty of people have died in nuclear accidents in the US (not meltdowns, but nuclear ones nontheless), and as far as I know "only" one died in Kennedy's car.

Look up:
-Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.
-Louis Slotin
-The 1964 Wood River Junction incident in Rhode Island (the operator died, but I don't know his name)
-Phil Harrigan (later died of cancer due to radiation exposure)
-John von Neumann (later died of cancer due to radiation exposure)

And the list isn't all-inclusive.

Wow. Considering your aversion to toxins, Im surprised by you wistah. And considering your country of origin was responsible for the biggest nuclear disaster in history, Pujo surprises me too.

Nukes are all well and good right? With two big assumptions...

1) NIMBY does not apply: you must have willing acceptors of waste, and its hardly set in stone that Yucca is that place regardless of what knucklehead thinks (after all, its not your backyard, right Luke?)

and 2) Price Anderson applies unhindered and we taxpayers all share the insurance costs of the industry. This is where I break. Nuke power is far more expensive than renewables. In fact, its been argued that the only way to make nukes cheap is to raise taxes, significantly, to cover its cost...ala France. But unlike France, we have much more arable land to put into use farming energy.

But yeah, since QuiGon says its a good idea, and he is willing to allow us to store some waste on his land, and he doesn't mind his tax increases to cover the liability insurance....Im all in, so long its not stored here and I dont pay for it.

Oh and theres one more small thing. How can we legitimately deny other nations, especially signatories of the NNPT, nuclear energy and technology when we escalate it here at home? Seems like a moral dilemma that noone wants to admit.

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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." - Isoroku Yamamoto's quote following the attack on Pearl Harbor

Nuke waste is a serious issue. All people who like nuke energy never talk about that. The waste takes thousands of years to decompose.

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"A theory that explains everything, explains nothing"