you need to find one gram of uranium for every kilogram of oil or coal you were digging up before
Possibly granted...but how do breeder reactors fit into this scheme? (Can plutonium be used in this reactor design they propose?)
you need to dispose of 1 gram plus whatever you've contaminated that isn't fuel of highly radioactive waste
Something I've always wondered about this: if it's highly radioactive, why isn't it (still) useful as an energy source?
Lets take a 10 to 1 ratio of fuel to other stuff in the waste for argument's sake.
OK, granted.
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.
Perhaps you're right. (Although is it really true that 1% of the oil we drill shows up in the environment?) But a few things to consider here...
(1) The pollution associated with oil and coal has been associated with using that power, and (aside from oil spills and environmental damage due to mining, which doesn't help the case for hydrocarbons) is widely distributed among all the devices that use them (e.g., cars). That is, in order to control this pollution, you have to get at everything that's burning oil and coal, which is both hard to control and expensive to do well.
Contrariwise, as far as I know, the pollution associated with nuclear materials has been associated with getting rid of the waste afterwards, or occasionally catastrophic accidents that scatter the material all to hell and gone (which we can consider to be analogous to oil spills, I guess). In this case, you know right where the material is at all times, and getting rid of the waste is a relatively centralized process.
(2) There may be a scale issue here. Handling tons of materials may be a lot easier to do safely than handling hundreds of tons.
(3) Seems to me that it's inherently more difficult to keep from spilling liquids than solids.
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.
Well, unless I'm missing something, either it's only slightly radioactive (in which case it is indeed close to permanent, but not very dangerous) or it's highly radioactive (in which case it's very dangerous, but only for a short period of time).
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...
I read a Slashdot article (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/14/1427207&tid=126&tid=134) yesterday; it starts out being about a different method of generating power (or possibly cleaning up pollution; the referenced site was slashdotted and I never saw it), but about halfway down there are some claims about the relative toxicity of plutonium and about the problems caused by using hydrocarbons (that being that we're dumping (hydro)carbons in the biosphere a lot faster than it can absorb them). Might be worth looking at; I'd like to get your opinion.
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branchandroot
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Date: 15 October 2004 13:40 (UTC)Possibly granted...but how do breeder reactors fit into this scheme? (Can plutonium be used in this reactor design they propose?)
Something I've always wondered about this: if it's highly radioactive, why isn't it (still) useful as an energy source?
OK, granted.
Perhaps you're right. (Although is it really true that 1% of the oil we drill shows up in the environment?) But a few things to consider here...
(1) The pollution associated with oil and coal has been associated with using that power, and (aside from oil spills and environmental damage due to mining, which doesn't help the case for hydrocarbons) is widely distributed among all the devices that use them (e.g., cars). That is, in order to control this pollution, you have to get at everything that's burning oil and coal, which is both hard to control and expensive to do well.
Contrariwise, as far as I know, the pollution associated with nuclear materials has been associated with getting rid of the waste afterwards, or occasionally catastrophic accidents that scatter the material all to hell and gone (which we can consider to be analogous to oil spills, I guess). In this case, you know right where the material is at all times, and getting rid of the waste is a relatively centralized process.
(2) There may be a scale issue here. Handling tons of materials may be a lot easier to do safely than handling hundreds of tons.
(3) Seems to me that it's inherently more difficult to keep from spilling liquids than solids.
Well, unless I'm missing something, either it's only slightly radioactive (in which case it is indeed close to permanent, but not very dangerous) or it's highly radioactive (in which case it's very dangerous, but only for a short period of time).
I read a Slashdot article (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/14/1427207&tid=126&tid=134) yesterday; it starts out being about a different method of generating power (or possibly cleaning up pollution; the referenced site was slashdotted and I never saw it), but about halfway down there are some claims about the relative toxicity of plutonium and about the problems caused by using hydrocarbons (that being that we're dumping (hydro)carbons in the biosphere a lot faster than it can absorb them). Might be worth looking at; I'd like to get your opinion.