Bruce County Ontario goes Nuclear

[HOZ]

Bring on the Nukes says Bruce County!

One month to the day of the launch -- Citizens for Bruce C is celebrating reaching its first goal.
The group has secured 10 thousand signatures to bring the first nuclear plant in a generation to Bruce County.


Good for them. I hope they are successful beating out the anti-nuke nuts that will trot out the Chernobyls and Three Mile Island horror stories.

Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and most efficient energy.

[Slava]

Sure nuclear energy is clean...how do you dispose of the waste cleanly again?

[SebC]

It's relatively clean. It's only really dirty if people screw it up.

[HotHotHeat]

Mmmmm CANCER!

[HOZ]

Originally Posted by Slava

Sure nuclear energy is clean...how do you dispose of the waste cleanly again?

A very pressing question.

Here are some facts about Nuclear energy.

Nuclear Waste

• Nuclear waste is produced in many different ways. There are wastes produced in the reactor core, wastes created as a result of radioactive contamination, and wastes produced as a byproduct of uranium mining, refining, and enrichment. The vast majority of radiation in nuclear waste is given off from spent fuel rods.
• A typical reactor will generate 20 to 30 tons of high-level nuclear waste annually. There is no known way to safely dispose of this waste, which remains dangerously radioactive until it naturally decays.
• The rate of decay of a radioactive isotope is called its half-life, the time in which half the initial amount of atoms present takes to decay. The half-life of Plutonium-239, one particularly lethal component of nuclear waste, is 24,000 years.
• The hazardous life of a radioactive element (the length of time that must elapse before the material is considered safe) is at least 10 half-lives. Therefore, Plutonium-239 will remain hazardous for at least 240,000 years.
• There is a current proposal to dump nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
  • The plan is for Yucca Mountain to hold all of the high level nuclear waste ever produced from every nuclear power plant in the US. However, that would completely fill up the site and not account for future waste.
  • Transporting the wastes by truck and rail would be extremely dangerous.
  • For a more detailed analysis of the problems of and risks incurred by the plan, see Top Ten Reasons to Oppose the DoE’s Yucca Mountain Plan

20 -30 tons annually versus the next most efficient energy source (coal burning plants) needs to be looked at and I don't have time to look.

[Slava]

^I'm all for clean energy, but that sentence pretty much says it all to me. 20-30 tonnes per year and no safe way to dispose of it. Couple that with the inherent weapons use around the world and you have a good idea of why there is opposition to nuclear power.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Slava

^I'm all for clean energy, but that sentence pretty much says it all to me. 20-30 tonnes per year and no safe way to dispose of it. Couple that with the inherent weapons use around the world and you have a good idea of why there is opposition to nuclear power.

France gets 80% of their energy from nuclear, so obviously they must have SOME way to dispose of the waste.

The problem is that nuclear is on the low part of the energy totem pole. Why should people invest money into finding solutions for waste management when you have so few plants throughout the world?

[photon]

Yet the current reactors deal with their waste.. Along with the many other industrial processes that create toxic byproducts that can't reasonably be dealt with, so they store it.

20-30 tonnes of waste per year that you know exactly where it is, compared to billions of tons of waste that you dump into the atmosphere and lose control over.

Plus there are many ways to build reactors, ways that EDIT, change that to ways that make it harder to get weapons grade materials. There are also reactors being developed that would re-burn the waste materials currently out there into far less radioactive materials that would need far shorter storage life spans.

Every type of energy supply is a problem, nuclear poses a different set of problems but since you know exactly where the waste is, right off the bat it's easier to manage.

It'd be much nicer if solar (and other solar derivatives like wind and hydro) was ready to take over as the primary source of energy, but we're a looooong long way from that, so nuclear is a viable stepping stone in my opinion.

[Azure]

I think you'd have a pretty hard time generating weapons grade material from a nuclear reactor designed to create energy.

Also, I believe the US has sunk two nuclear carriers/subs/not sure actually....and they monitor the nuclear reactor underground and its still in great shape.

I agree though, nuclear IS the way of the future, and the faster we embrace that, the faster we stop depending on foreign oil.

[photon]

Well it depends.. the enrichment process to make uranium a good fuel can also be used to make weapons grade materials (i.e. instead of going to 3 or 5% of U-235 go to 85% U-235, of course that's a pretty significant leap).. The big problem is that Pu-239 is left over in spent fuel rods, and that can be made into weapons. It can also be burned in reactors but that requires a different reactor to burn it well so right now (in the US's case anyway) they just store it, if it was reprocessed that helps with the waste problem.

[FlamesAddiction]

what's the big deal? Ontario already has nuclear power plants.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by HOZ

A very pressing question.

• The rate of decay of a radioactive isotope is called its half-life, the time in which half the initial amount of atoms present takes to decay. The half-life of Plutonium-239, one particularly lethal component of nuclear waste, is 24,000 years.
• The hazardous life of a radioactive element (the length of time that must elapse before the material is considered safe) is at least 10 half-lives. Therefore, Plutonium-239 will remain hazardous for at least 240,000 years.

What they arent telling you is that the original mined isotope is unsafe to being with. Untreated the material returns to its normal level of safeness in about 10,000 years. Once treated that number is brought down to below 1000 years (I forget the exact number, looking for a source).

Also other plants such as coal produce significant amounts of radioactive material in themselves. The radioactive material from these plants is much harder to contain.

[HalifaxDrunk]

Originally Posted by photon

It'd be much nicer if solar (and other solar derivatives like wind and hydro) was ready to take over as the primary source of energy, but we're a looooong long way from that, so nuclear is a viable stepping stone in my opinion.

Were trying down here!

Nova Scotia to get tidal energy centre

[Flames89]

Some Myths and Realities of Nuclear Waste:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf103.html

"High Level Waste is currently increasing by about 12,000 tonnes worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of a two-storey structure built on a basketball court or about 100 double-decker buses and is modest compared with other industrial wastes."

"In the OECD some 300 million tonnes of toxic wastes are produced each year, but conditioned radioactive wastes amount to only 81,000 cubic metres per year. In countries with nuclear power, radioactive wastes comprise less than 1% of total industrial toxic wastes (the balance of which remains hazardous indefinitely).

[Cheese]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

what's the big deal? Ontario already has nuclear power plants.

yep...
and derives more electricity from nuclear than other fuel forms.
http://www.ieso.ca/
see generation by fuel type on the right.

[ernie]

One problem with nuclear waste is the high volume of it because much of it is radioactive salts dissolved in water (and not heavy water...normal water). This is a good chunk of what gets buried in mountain sides.

There are ways to precipitate out the salts decreasing the volume of waste by a substantial amount as you are now burying a small brick of solid instead of a barrel of solution. There is at least one nuclear plant in Russia that uses a technology like this. The problem with the technology is the cost of the precipitate reagent and mass production of the reagent.

[Frequitude]

20-30 tonnes is NOTHING. Like, we're talking it would maybe fill your bedroom, if that.

What do you prefer:
1) A bedroom full of extrodinarily dangerous waste (radioactive material) that you can safely store and contain and keep track of, or
2) Hundreds of thousands of tons of lower/moderately dangerous waste (CO2, NOx, SOx) that you can't store or keep track of, but actually pump it into the air you breathe.

?????

I'll take A anytime.