I don't think there's a catch in the sense that the reactor design they propose is probably genuinely better than the traditional ones. On the other hand...
Nuclear reactors have got problems besides the Big Scary Meltdown scenario. One of the big ones is what to do with nuclear waste. A rough rule of thumb is that uranium fission gives you about 1000 times the energy per mass of fuel as burning hydrocarbons. So that means that if you want to replace the oil and coal power supply with a nuclear power supply you need to do two things. One: you need to find one gram of uranium for every kilogram of oil or coal you were digging up before, and two: you need to dispose of 1 gram plus whatever you've contaminated that isn't fuel of highly radioactive waste. Lets take a 10 to 1 ratio of fuel to other stuff in the waste for argument's sake. That means that unless we get better at shipping hazardous materials around the planet, you should think of how much oil and stuff we've dumped into the oceans, etc, by various accidents and start getting used to 1% of that mass of radioactive goo on average showing up in the environment.
And remember, radioactive waste is to a pretty good approximation permanent. It doesn't decompose except over geological time scales, and it doesn't biodegrade. Dumping carbon dioxide into the air is a pretty bad thing to do, but at least there is a significant collection of mechanisms that pull CO2 back OUT of the air over time...
Switching from hydrocarbons to nuclear is really about switching from one hard to find fossil fuel that leaves nasty decomposition products, to another hard to find fossil fuel that leaves nastier decomposition products. It might tactically be a good choice if you're running critically low on hydrocarbon fuels, but it isn't in any long term sense a SOLUTION.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 14 October 2004 14:53 (UTC)Nuclear reactors have got problems besides the Big Scary Meltdown scenario. One of the big ones is what to do with nuclear waste. A rough rule of thumb is that uranium fission gives you about 1000 times the energy per mass of fuel as burning hydrocarbons. So that means that if you want to replace the oil and coal power supply with a nuclear power supply you need to do two things. One: you need to find one gram of uranium for every kilogram of oil or coal you were digging up before, and two: you need to dispose of 1 gram plus whatever you've contaminated that isn't fuel of highly radioactive waste. Lets take a 10 to 1 ratio of fuel to other stuff in the waste for argument's sake. That means that unless we get better at shipping hazardous materials around the planet, you should think of how much oil and stuff we've dumped into the oceans, etc, by various accidents and start getting used to 1% of that mass of radioactive goo on average showing up in the environment.
And remember, radioactive waste is to a pretty good approximation permanent. It doesn't decompose except over geological time scales, and it doesn't biodegrade. Dumping carbon dioxide into the air is a pretty bad thing to do, but at least there is a significant collection of mechanisms that pull CO2 back OUT of the air over time...
Switching from hydrocarbons to nuclear is really about switching from one hard to find fossil fuel that leaves nasty decomposition products, to another hard to find fossil fuel that leaves nastier decomposition products. It might tactically be a good choice if you're running critically low on hydrocarbon fuels, but it isn't in any long term sense a SOLUTION.
-JKL