[TheForge] OT: nukes etc. WAS:Hellooooooo!

[Demon Buddha]

Todd Rich wrote:

> As far a nuclear wastes are concerned, the nuclear wasted produced to 
> provide all the energy needs of a family of 4 for 20 years will fit in a 
> shoebox.  If reprocessing of nuclear fuel were allowed in this country 
> (hasn't been since Carter banned it) that amount of power would produce 
> only enough nuclear waste to fit into a pill bottle.

	Big "ifs".  I suppose Carter or his handlers acted in the interests of 
the energy establishment... or in an attempt to kiss up to the 
anti-nuclear crowd, or both.

	There are more problems with all of this, and they all have to do with 
the bad habits of people.  There are enough people in the USA with 
sufficiently untrustworthy characters that I would find it difficult to 
trust that an extra dollar here or there would not cause them to take 
shortcuts and other unworthy paths of action.  Given the current 
environment, I wouldn't trust operators to the door.  If there was a 
mandatory death penalty to anyone causing death or maiming stemming from 
corrupt deviations from standard procedures, that would be a good first 
step to better ensuring that grease offered to palms became vanishingly 
attractive.  I would not allow such operations to be privately owned or 
operated.  Far be it for me to advocate communistic anything, but the 
profit motive would have to be completely removed from such endeavors. 
Many of the problems we've had here with nukes can be tied to profit 
motives.  OTOH, the Soviet morons didn't do a whole lot better with 
their centrally controlled nuclear programs.  The events at places such 
as Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk serve of shining examples of state owned 
possibilities.  The USA is not exempt, either.  I audited a class with a 
guy at CCNY, Mishio Kaku, and he went through all these nuclear 
disasters from the 40s through the 60s.  We've had plenty and the 
results were not so pretty, though they were pretty well hushed up to 
the public eye.

	I just don't trust people enough to feel comfortable with this idea. 
There is always someone willing to do the wrong thing for the sake of a 
token fortune.  Look at Union Carbide and their neat little disaster at 
Bhopal.  It's easy to ignore until the disaster shows up in your own 
back yard.  2500 people dead in one shot because UC was too lax on 
safety, and that because of profit motive conflicts with doing "the 
right thing".  It's too much in the nature of the human animal to 
misbehave in such ways.  I don't much care if you kill of maim yourself, 
but I'm not terribly interested in being taken along for the ride.
> 
> High level nuclear waste only has to be kept around for about 1000 
> years. Yes that is a long time, but it can be done safely.

	I agree that it can, as long as nothing extraordinary happens.  But 
what happens with the extraordinary occurs?  1000 years is a very long 
time when your environment is posioned.  A few thousand square miles 
surrounding Chernobyl are in pretty sad shape these days and aren't 
going to get better any time soon.  Do you think that these risks are 
really worth it?  I don't care how well you design a system, it can fail.
> 
> If you are worried that it will be too long, we can make thorium 
> reverberatory nuclear furnaces.  Basic concept is a particle accelerator 
> pointed a a pile of thorium.  When it is on, it produced more energy 
> than needed to keep powering the acclerator.  When you want to shut it 
> down, you turn off the acclerator.  The waste it produces, while hotter 
> than the convention fuel cycle is much shorter lived, plus you can use 
> the high level waste produced from a conventional fuel cycle as fuel, 
> burning it up.

	Sounds promising, but are there any hidden costs?  Rather, what ARE the 
hidden costs.  There are no free rides.

> It has the added benefit of not producing isotopes that are easily 
> turned into weapons grade nuclear material.
> 
> Switching from coal to nuclear would also have added benefits of 
> dramatically reducing the amound of CO2 dumped into our atmosphere.

	But we'd still be introducing plenty of additional heat into the 
atmosphere.  I suspect that such schemes will only encourage an ever 
growing habit of wastefulness, people feeling they now have a free ride 
situation on their hands.  There's too much historical precedent to let 
me think otherwise.  The only cure for that is through pricing and we're 
too used to whining about such things so that legislators cave and make 
pricing controls illegal.