Nuclear waste: bury it and forget? (Media Editorializing Posing As News alert)

The signal audible every second in every corridor of the high-level toxic nuclear waste plant on Britain's sprawling Sellafield site is a sign all the alarms are working. If it stops, or changes tone, something has gone very wrong.

"The people who work here every day tell me they get used to it. But it tends to get on the nerves of everyone who visits the plant," Sellafield information officer Ben Chilton told Reuters on a tour of the site 480 km (300 miles) northwest of London.

The alarms are crucial for an industry that believes it could be granted a new lease of life as the world searches for an alternative to fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, that produce carbon emissions, blamed for global warming.

The nuclear industry says its technology emits no carbon and does not cause global warming but for many, still wary after disasters like the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, the lingering fear is that the toxic waste might leak and kill.

Sellafield, and a plant at La Hague in northern France, can each reprocess 5,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel each year, accounting for roughly a third of annual global output.

But there will be more waste. China plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by 2020, India has struck a deal with the United States to build several more plants, the United States is lining up tax incentives for new generators and Britain is considering new plants to plug a looming energy gap.

The sludge that flows down the heavily armoured pipe into Sellafield's vitrification plant after plutonium and uranium have been taken from spent fuel rods for reuse is a hell's brew still emitting 40 times a lethal dose of radiation.

In shielded chambers with technicians watching through metre-thick leaded glass windows and using remote mechanical arms, the toxic stew is cooked down to a powder, combined with molten glass and poured into stainless steel urns.

These are cooled, closed and scrubbed before being sealed in insulated steel flasks and taken away for storage where, standing 10 deep in a concrete core and capped by a three-metre (10-foot) plug, the heat from the radiation is still tangible.

There are nearly 4,000 of these containers stored at Sellafield, which was the world's first commercial nuclear power plant when it opened in 1956, with room for 4,000 more.

Final disposal of the waste involves burying it in geologically stable formations. The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years -- in other words, it would take up to 250,000 years before it degrades completely.

Chilton said waste comes from Britain, which has 11 nuclear plants, and from countries as far away as Japan, the third biggest nuclear power user after the United States and France.

Sellafield's scientists are confident they have the answers on waste and believe nuclear power can help ease climate change.

"From a technical point of view we can deal with any waste that comes from nuclear plants," said Graham Fairhall of Nexiasolutions, the research arm of the British Nuclear Group.

But for the green lobby, nuclear waste is an unacceptable legacy, whatever the benefits of nuclear power.

"Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive," said Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. "We are only talking seriously about nuclear power again because of climate change. But it is not the answer."

Environmentalists say the costs of nuclear energy are not clear because of government subsidies and the toxic waste.

The latest estimate on the cost of cleaning up the waste from the last 50 years is 56 billion pounds ($97 billion), Juniper said.

"There may be technical solutions to dealing with the waste that will be generated, but note that they are still trying to deal with the waste they have already created," he told Reuters.

The British government, which has covered the costs so far, says finance for new reactors must come from the private sector.

An energy review in Britain, which faces a 20 percent power shortfall within a decade as aging nuclear and coal-powered plants shut down, is due to be ready by the middle of the year.

It is not just the high-level waste from fuel rods that has to be dealt with. Intermediate-level waste such as the casings of nuclear fuel rods, and low-level waste such as that produced in hospitals also has to be processed and stored.

Intermediate waste is chopped up and put in steel barrels that are filled with concrete and stored, while low-level waste is put in steel boxes that are crushed and put in a container, which is then filled with concrete and buried.

Industry experts say high, intermediate or low-level waste does not pose a security risk as one would need industrial-style resources -- like protective gear and surroundings -- to even approach the high-level waste, and the other two forms are either non-retrievable or non-lethal.

Public opinion in Britain is gradually swinging toward accepting nuclear energy to help combat climate change -- 54 percent were in favor according to a poll this year -- despite worries about the waste and security.

But while the nuclear industry says a Chernobyl-scale disaster could not happen here because the technology is different, some of the legacy problems remain a major headache.

At Sellafield, 49 years after a fire forced the closure of the Windscale I military reactor, scientists are still trying to work out how to dismantle the chimney-top filter that trapped the radioactive smoke and stopped a nuclear catastrophe.

I was passing through the Yahoo.com homepage, and came across this headline in the "In The News" sub-window:

"Push for nuclear plants would increase waste"

Given the ongoing controvery of foreign wars in the middle east, in part, we are told, for oil, it would be natural to turn to alternative sources of energy. At least, rationally, that's what the leftist elite arguments would point towards. On such source, nuclear energy, doesn't produce greenhouse emissions, another big no-no.

So it's funny, then, to see these kinds of pre-emptive articles by the crusading left. I think it's pretty much a given that industialized societies will have to turn more towards nuclear energy due to the instability in the middle east, and for the sake of engergy independence. But from the department of "they want to have their cake and eat it too," these elites don't approve of bringing new nuclear generators online. Which is why, in the long run, they will lose politically.

What these people are selling is shared poverty. They want us to use less oil, but offer no reasonable substitute. Perhaps we can break out the sweaters again?

If the Left were selling policies that would bring increased prosperity, they'd do better in elections in the U.S. It's been a looong time since they were seen as agents for such change. No amount of re-framing the political arguments will convince lower and middle class people to do with less, in normal peacetime.

But while the nuclear industry says a Chernobyl-scale disaster could not happen here because the technology is different

How many people died at Chernobyl anyway? Lefty websites put the "more credible estimates of the eventual death toll from this one accident" at between 450,000 to three million.

It will come as no suprise to Freepers that the actual figures are that the fallout from Number Four reactor at Chernobyl killed 31 people almost immediately. Within the next few years, the Soviet government admitted the deaths of 224 others. Every estimate after that is based upon the shifting sands and shiftier logic of UN statistics.

"How many people died at Chernobyl anyway? Lefty websites put the "more credible estimates of the eventual death toll from this one accident" at between 450,000 to three million."

I don't think anyone feels a Chernobyl type release is desirable. The good news is that with modern US reactor technology, there is no chance of something like that happening.

I advocate pebble bed technology, with a few fast breeder reactors to reprocess waste into plutonium. The high-level waste that's no longer processable should be packaged appropriately and dumped along the mid-Pacific subduction zone. The anti-nuke movement is pure anti-technology, anti-progress Luddite fuzzy thinking.

"250,000 years before it degrades completely."

LOL. I think given THAT amount of time we will figure out how to safely dispose of the materials. Hell probably in the next 100 years at the rate humanity is advancing. And we will move beyond fission eventually too.

The left thrives on false perceptions of crisis.

I always wonder if the Lefties that are so opposed to current nuclear waste disposal methods would back taking the radioactive waste and putting it right back into the ground in the same places where we dug up the uranium in the first place.

I bet not, even though the net result would be very similar to if we had never dug up the uranium (or other radioactive) ore intially.

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