““It is cheap, reliable, and waste-free.” Nuclear power can make that claim, not solar.”
” Huh? Yeah real safe[roll eyes] “
Let’s start by pointing out that in Three Mile Island nobody was killed or injured. Chernobyl occured using Soviet technology built to be unsafe that was always illegal in any wester country - they didnt have a containment vessel that every western reactor has (the containment vessel proved itself in the Three Mile Island accident, preventing excape of radioactivity).
The heavily-recuglated nuclear power industry has had a very good safety record in the US. When you compare other industries, nuclear is indeed safer (consider coal mining disasters in recent years, or refinery explosions or even construction accidents).
” Underground storage at Yucca Mountain in U.S. has been proposed as permanent storage. After 10,000 years of radioactive decay, according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards, the spent nuclear fuel will no longer pose a threat to public health and safety.”
Yes, this is following very stringent EPA rules. What they *dont* mention is that most radioactivity is gone in the first 20 years, and by 300 years practically *all* the radioactivity of radiation products is *gone*. The materials is about 5 orders of magnitude less radioactive, ie loses 99.999% of its radioactivity in first 300 years - the used fuel after 300 years is no more radioactive than uranium ore found naturally... But the fact is that nuclear used fuel is a valuable resource that is radioactive partly because *it remains to be fuel*. It has Pu, Ur, and other actinide components that can and should be recycled into nuclear power plants. These actinides have long half-lives that make the remaining radioactivity, tiny though it is, last a long time. If we did recycle such fuel, the already small waste stream could be reduced by a factor of 60, and the radioactive waste would fall to background radioactivity levels within 300 years. I would prefer this method to the ‘once through’ method, but opponents of nuclear energy in the Jimmy Carter era mandated ‘once through’ just to be annoying and it stuck.
Despite all this, it remains that the entire country’s used nuclear fuel can fit into the size of a municipal waste dump... it’s a small, not big, problem:
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=62
“High energy means a small volume of used fuel. Every 12-24 months, U.S. plants are shut down and the oldest fuel assemblies are removed and replaced. All of the country’s nuclear power plants together produce about 2,000 metric tons of used fuel annually. To put this in perspective, all the used fuel produced to date by the U.S. nuclear energy industry in more than 40 years of operation—some 50,000 metric tons—would cover an area the size of a football field to a depth of about six yards, if the fuel assemblies were stacked side by side and laid end to end.”