The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc).
This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel:
http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si....
I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.
It normally is! But. It has catastrophic failure modes. (Yes, pebble beds. Let's talk about realities, not if-onlys.)
Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. And governments only do it because they have sovereign immunity from those whose interests they're supposedly representing.
I firmly believe that any interested parties who want to go nuclear, should, and reap those rewards. If you can't find an insurer, go find wealthy people who believe in your design to indemnify you.
Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me.
> Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk.
That would be a fine if it was a level playing field.
Lots of things have catastrophic failure modes. Dams[1], supertankers[2], chemical plants[3], oil drilling rigs[4], coal mines[5], etc. To say nothing of climate change.
The reason those things have no trouble being built anyway is that they aren't required to carry billions of dollars in insurance coverage to begin with.
And maybe they should, but you can't single out nuclear for a requirement to carry that much insurance and then fault it for not being able to satisfy that requirement when its competitors don't.
>Yet that's exactly what we're doing with coal and petroleum.
Only coal and petroleum is mined thousands of miles aways from me, and even if e.g. there's an oil spill, it won't kill thousands in hundreds miles radius.
Coal is mined where I grew up and they rip entire mountains apart, throw the dross back, and leak sulfur into the streams for the next 50 years.
In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
I'm going to stop here, because any relevant adjective I would use to describe people like you would just get me banned.
>I'm going to stop here, because any relevant adjective I would use to describe people like you would just get me banned.
The main word I'd use to describe "people like you", given the above, is rude.
The ad-hominem doesn't add anything to the case. And who would "people like me" be? Anybody that has concerns or might be against nuclear power? Because they are necessarily ignorant luddites, and only those for it are the level-headed ones, right?
Well, nuclear reactors and energy production is not science (the science part is done at the academic level), it is applied technology. And technology mingles with private interests, politics and bad actors all the time (e.g. constructors who don't install enough safety measures, governments who don't give a shit about global environmental treaties, loonies who might want to blow up reactors or get their hands to the by products, human errors, political ass-saving, tons of money to be made, higher profit margins by not properly taking care of by products, etc.),
Now to answer the specific points:
"Leak[ing] sulfur into the streams for the next 50 years" doesn't even compare to having to take care of radioactive materials for the next millennia, neither in the extend of time, nor to the potential impact.
Your answer also seems to imply that e.g. uranium mining doesn't have an environmental impact, and it's only coal that "rips entire mountains apart"...
>In addition, in California, the radioactive sulfur in pollution from the coal burning plants in China SWAMPS the radiation release from Fukushima by several orders of magnitude.
All caps "swamps" aside, this would be only relevant if Fukushima was the epitome of nuclear disaster and the "radiation release from Fukushima" was the highest level of tradition release possible (or close).
> this would be only relevant if Fukushima was the epitome of nuclear disaster
Isn't it? I thought what happened at Fukushima was the worst case scenario for a nuclear power plant of its type. What is the worst that could have happened?
Nuclear is very clean. What most people came to hate is the waste, which is surprisingly little (per kW). Also the danger in case of failure, which is massive.
We have no practical way to clean CO2 from the atmosphere and we don't need catastrophe for it to be a problem. We're poisoning the planet with real carbon dioxide while we fret about the hypothetical risks of hypothetical nuclear waste.
We could replace coal with nuclear yesterday if the anti-nuclear activists would stand down. Instead, they have fought to continue a status quo whose death toll we start couting at 25,000 people per year lost to black lung [0]. No serial killer or terrorist could dream of effecting mass casualites as efficiently as the proponents of this viewpoint do when they take action that results in the continued and expanding operation of coal power generation, despite an alternative which is actually viable in every respect but their opposition.
Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder).
The total volume of which would fit in an apartment block. That block could be dropped into the marina trench if you really are that paranoid, total cost a few million dollars.
There is no conceivable way of removing even daily worldwide human carbon waste from the atmosphere for that kind of money.
Sure the physical size of a spent fuel might be 'small' but this is not the only issue.
And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
No you can dump low level waste under 1m of topsoil, and build a hospital or school or kindergarten on top of it. That's why its called low-level waste.
>> And the low level waste - of which there is approx 360000 tons? Would the Mariana Trench would be a good/safe place to place this? Based on what reckoning?
Solar panels production. Currently, they are mostly produced from scraps of semiconductor industry, and it's already close to capacity. This process is energy inefficient and environmentally unfriendly (silicon tetrachloride is an intermediate stage).
Pushing for more silicon solar panels beyond what's possible as semiconductor industry byproduct is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
"In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells."
It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
It is not that it is impossible to run photovoltaic panels production de novo (and it is done in large scale these days, as you have correctly stated). The problem is that it is economically unsustainable and have to be financed by government subsidies (or, alternatively, moved to cheap Chinese factories disregarding environmental costs completely).
There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
There are some interesting moral gymnastics required there, no? The Chinese lead the world in PV manufacturing right now. Is this PV-revolution necessarily built on dirty manufacturing? Would we still have a PV-revolution if we weren't so accepting of an environmental disaster that takes place in a distant country?
My guess is that there would still be a PV revolution even without the Chinese factories, though the cost drops might have a come a bit slower. Costs were dropping at about the same year-over-year rate for decades before China leapt to the top of the PV manufacturing ranks.
Silicon refiners in the US actually had lower production costs than Chinese refiners even with the extra labor and environmental costs in the US. Unfortunately, a few years ago China imposed punitive trade barriers against silicon imported from the US. It was in retaliation for trade barriers the US put up against imports of Chinese solar modules. Until both sides erected their dueling trade barriers, the value of US-to-China silicon exports just about balanced the value of China-to-US modules. It was like a textbook example of comparative advantage. Now Chinese manufacturers get higher priced silicon made with fewer environmental protections, and US buyers get higher priced modules :-/
My impression is that most large-scale clean energy projects go for wind power, indirect solar energy (use sunlight to heat up some medium which then drives turbines or rotors) or bio fuel - with more exotic stuff like geothermic energy where it's applicable.
Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?
This is the difficulty.
Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years in the future for the past 50 years.