KaiserJeep wrote:Silly premise. Nor is the nuclear fuel cycle carbon free. Mining uranium requires oil powered machines, and enriching uranium for fission requires electricity, still mostly made from coal.
onlooker wrote:Tanada, or anybody else who might know. If I may ask out of pure curiosity. Not taking a position either pro or con nuclear. If in fact over the course of a few decades, civilization declines precipitously, how or can all the current nuclear reactors be decommissioned safely and effectively? And also, can all the waste products being safely stored-reused for at least a few hundred years?
GHung wrote:onlooker wrote:Tanada, or anybody else who might know. If I may ask out of pure curiosity. Not taking a position either pro or con nuclear. If in fact over the course of a few decades, civilization declines precipitously, how or can all the current nuclear reactors be decommissioned safely and effectively? And also, can all the waste products being safely stored-reused for at least a few hundred years?
There is a long list of chemical and nuclear sites that have simply been abandoned rather than be cleaned up, especially in the former USSR; This during relatively stable times for civilization. If things fall apart to any degree, does anyone really think we'll do any better?
Ghung, you have been on this site for quite some time and have not been convinced at all about the safety of nuclear.
A Table showing about 150 shutdown reactors is at the end of this paper. About 17 of these had the full decommissioning process completed by the end of 2016.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/informatio ... ities.aspx
Ghung: ...the complex and expensive processes that determines who cleans it up and who pays.
Tanada wrote:The problem with all these gloom and doom forecasts about how 'awful' nuclear waste is you can not point to any examples of massive death tolls from nuclear energy production. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.
The closest anyone can come is Chernobyl where at the very extreme limit of possible relation to actual events you might tacitly link a few thousand excess deaths to the disaster.
Meanwhile nuclear fission electricity has offset billions of tons of CO2 production and along with that it has offset hundreds of thousands, possibly million, of deaths from respiratory ailments that would have resulted from producing the same electricity with fossil fuels. That is not just coal, but also oil and natural gas all of which cause deaths from people inhaling the exhaust products as they are spewed willy nilly into the environment.
A more realistic look at Chernobyl's effects find less than 100 deaths from acute radiation sickness and a few hundred cases of thyroid disease because the population was deficient in dietary iodine and absorbed too much of the radioactive isotope in the first three weeks after the accident before it decayed away to safe levels. If you consume the appropriate amounts of iodine in your diet then you are relatively immune to the thyroid issue that caused most of the harm after Chernobyl. Nobody in Japan suffered the same issue as a result of Fukushima and with the media hysteria you must realize a mass breakout of thyroid illness would have been headlines around the world.
GHung wrote:Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?
Tanada wrote:GHung wrote:Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?
What do you imagine happens when you walk away from a defueled reactor either before or after decomissioning? You have a large steel vessel that has a mild radioactive output and a lot of concrete some of which may reasonably be classified as also emitting more radioactivity than it did when it was freshly manufactured. That is it. The radiation levels are low enough after a few weeks that workers can walk within meters of the reactor vessel in complete safety, and that vessel is encased in a several meter thick concrete shell. Close the door and walk away, nothing much is going to happen within the lifetime of the materials present.
KaiserJeep wrote:Far from being financial burdens, nuclear commercial power plants have long been profit centers for the utilities that own them. Nor have any decommisioned plants ever been abandonned or been any type of hazard for surrounding populations.
If you want to understand some real hazards, look into the management and mismanagement of coal ash from commercial power plants. They literally are the most dangerous form of power generation. Meanwhile fools obsess over nuclear power, in truth the safest by a huge factor.
The numbers say that coal kills ONE MILLION TIMES as many people as nuclear. If you know something we should be considering, or a better way of measuring safety than counting actual human casualties from energy generation, please share.
onlooker wrote:Assumes BAU for a long, long time.----
That is the conundrum isn't. Can Nuclear exist safely within the context of a declining and chaotic downturn of modern civilization. I am persuaded by Tanada that Nuclear could have been a real effective answer to humanities energy. But the caveat is that serious financial turmoil seems to be on the horizon and in this context it Nuclear may not be all that feasible
I am persuaded by Tanada that Nuclear could have been a real effective answer to humanities energy.
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