1. natural uranium stock is much smaller than that of oil and gas.

2. renewable energy can satisfy an arguable energy demand in future. the key to satisfy demand is to limit demand by efficiency

3. "solutions" for nuclear waste are no solutions for safety problems by the process of using nuclear power. and don´t forget the dark side of the nuclear industry. most of those companies are also invided in the weapons-industry. all countries would have a stronger position towards states like iran, if there would be no use of nuclear technology at all.

You can't beat an energy crisis through technology alone. Renewable energy might satisfy the world's energy needs, but not todays world. The world would have to be educated and change their culture to be conscious of energy consumption problems. Until that happens, any technological improvements to renewable energy will be running toward an ever retreating finish line.



Also, nuclear weapons are out of the box now, and there's no putting them back. Even if we could magically get rid of all nuclear weapons knowledge, there's plenty of scientists around the world developing new technologies that can be used as devastating weapons. A nuclear weapon is just a tool, the important part is the person behind the button. Why doesn't Switzerland fear getting nuked? Because they don't get into other countries' business. If we had the same policy, we wouldn't live in fear either.

Please see the Rocky Mountain Institute's information on energy - nuclear and otherwise - as it's some of the smartest, most coherent, info available on the relative merits of the different technologies you all are discussing from a life-cycle perspective.

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Ed. Note: Thanks for the tip. Hyperlink to: RMI Energy.

The uranium reserves maybe less than that of oil and gas, but it is much higher in energy density. On top of that, if the spent fuel is permitted to be reproccessed into plutonium for further energy extraction, the energy potential of uranium more than doubles.

FYI, it is way harder to make a plutonium bomb than a uranium bomb. The only way to get a plutonium mass to go supercritical is to implode it, and the technology to do that is extremely difficult to develop, maintain, and use.

As for long term isolation of nuclear waste, the best way, if it has to be done, is vitrification and geologic isolation. When the non-useful waste materials are dissolved into massive hardened glass slugs (just like making stained glass by dissolving various metals into molten glass), they can't leach out, nor corrode like steel barrels, nor dissolve (as glass is chemically inert and insoluble except in the presence of very few of the strongest acids). The slugs can then be embedded deep in the mud flats of the sea planes, where there it is far from faults, turbulent water and currents, live fissures (which have their own sulfer-based eco systems), and volcanic activity, and more importantly, any eco system it could impact. Certainly, it will be out of the way of any humans. Once embeded deep in the mud (50-100 meters), the slugs would sterilize the mud around them of any present germs and microbes, but since the waste is dissolved into glass, non of the radioactive substances that are dissolved into the glass can leach out, and best of all the glass slugs won't corrode even in the presence of salt water.

But I do agree that the less we depend on nuclear power, the less hypocritical it would be for us to address nations like Iran. I'd prefer to see the world run on solar stirling engines and switch grass, but if nuclear waste has to be delt with (and it will in the foreseeable future), there's no better way to deal with it than vitrification and embeding it where no humans can get to it.

Yes! Yes! YES!

I'm sorry, I just get a little excited when hearing about safe ways to dispose of nuclear waste. Even if we never touch uranium again, we've still got tons of old waste out there that we need to figure out how to make benign over a relatively short period of time.

Tom Valone of Integrety Research, an energy and physics expert, has said that effective remediation of radioactive waste has already been done by microsecond blasts from powerful lasers. This is government research that's buried in a DoE report and never got published by the press. Not only can you remediate radioactive waste, you can produce usable electrical energy from a nuclear source without waste to begin with. I think he said it was a proto-boron reaction that doesn't require huge concrete towers and pools.

Julian:

What causes radioactivity is either a shortage or an excess of neutrons. (Uranium 235 for example, is radioactive and is fission material due to a neutron shortage. U 238 is not.) No amount of blasting with powerful lasers can remove radioactivity because the nucleus is way tinier than any of the wavelengths of light in any lasers ever developed; lasers can ionize the atoms, but cannot add or remove particles such as neutrons. To claim that it could would contradict known laws of physics. Lasers would only vaporize the waste and disperse it (contaminating everything around), not remove radioactivity. If I'm mistaken, please provide a link to where you read this; it would be awesome if lasers could do such a thing.

This technique of neutralizing radioactive waste described in the article is basically a technique of adding neutrons to forms of waste that have long half-lives in order to transmute them into waste with short or more managable half-lives. New Scientist magazine reported early findings of this concept in the late 90's.

"1. natural uranium stock is much smaller than that of oil and gas." True. But current light water reactors use only 5% of the energy contained within that uranium. Fast breeder reactors, which will be more prevalent in future, use more than 95% of the energy through recycling of the waste uranium. This not only allows full use of the energy but also reduces to a trickle the amount of radioactive waste produced and that waste becomes inert in about 100 years. Theoretically, a newly built fast breeder reactor only needs to be supplied with uranium once, when it begins operation. After that, it needs no new uranium for decades assuming constant output. And the very small amount of waste can be maintained at the plant. If this new technology is as mentioned, fast breeder reactors may be able to solve the waste problem. BUT..
"3. "solutions" for nuclear waste are no solutions for safety problems by the process of using nuclear power." Safety issues do remain; even though they would be mitigated with a fast breeder reactor using this new technology.

"2. renewable energy can satisfy an arguable energy demand in future. the key to satisfy demand is to limit demand by efficiency" I believe fully exploiting all renewable energies throughout the world can produce enough energy to meet the world´s energy demands many times over. Greenpeace commissioned a study from a respected Spanish university to determine how much of Spain´s energy needs could be met if all of Spain´s renewable energies were fully exploited. The conclusion was over 40 times the predicted energy consumption of 2050.

"As for long term isolation of nuclear waste, the best way, if it has to be done, is vitrification and geologic isolation. When the non-useful waste materials are dissolved into massive hardened glass slugs (just like making stained glass by dissolving various metals into molten glass), they can't leach out, nor corrode like steel barrels, nor dissolve (as glass is chemically inert and insoluble except in the presence of very few of the strongest acids). The slugs can then be embedded deep in the mud flats of the sea planes, where there it is far from faults, turbulent water and currents, live fissures (which have their own sulfer-based eco systems), and volcanic activity, and more importantly, any eco system it could impact. Certainly, it will be out of the way of any humans. Once embeded deep in the mud (50-100 meters), the slugs would sterilize the mud around them of any present germs and microbes, but since the waste is dissolved into glass, non of the radioactive substances that are dissolved into the glass can leach out, and best of all the glass slugs won't corrode even in the presence of salt water." True vitrification does what you mention. But I think vitrification only really works for waste from fast breeder reactors and this waste, if coupled with this new technology mentioned in this article, wouldn´t need to be stored deep in the ground. The small amount of waste coupled with its short period of unsafe radioactivity plus vitrification means the stuff can be stored onsite at the plant safely. Which would be the same as what most are doing now - storing onsite but unsafely.

"I'm sorry, I just get a little excited when hearing about safe ways to dispose of nuclear waste. Even if we never touch uranium again, we've still got tons of old waste out there that we need to figure out how to make benign over a relatively short period of time." Old waste can be reused in fast breeder reactors. That is if the stuff hasn´t already been vitrified or sealed deep underground.

Houston mentioned volcanic activity. I was thinking about that last night, after reading Stewart Brand's pro-nuclear article in TechReview. What would indeed happen if we sank nuclear waste in active volcanos? Anybody know if there's been studies done?

"Natural uranium stock is much smaller than that of oil and gas."

Utterly false. The world's actual uranium reserves are much larger than its coal reserves, let alone its (much smaller) oil and gas reserves, and that's assuming the once through cycle! Even with the once-through cycle, we have several hundred years of uranium supply. With breeder reactors, the fuel supply is essentially infinite.

More details at:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

"All countries would have a stronger position towards states like Iran, if there would be no use of nuclear technology at all."

It's pointless to talk about no use of nuclear technology at all in the future. Furthermore, even if the West walked away from nuclear, places like Russia and the Middle East would not follow our lead. We will have given up all the benefits of nuclear (no pollution, no CO2), and the proliferation problem will not be helped at all.

As far as the specific statement concerning Iran, the very reverse is true. The reason why nothing has been done about Iran is precisely because we are so dependent on their oil and gas. This is particularly true of China (a UN veto holder).

90% of the world's remaining natural gas reserves lie in Russia, Iran, and Algeria. The West is about to become as dependent on these countries for gas as it now is for oil, primarily due to the use of gas for power generation. The reason why tough diplomatic measures (e.g., sanctions, etc..) have not been taken is that all these dependent nations are terrified of an Iranian oil/gas embargo, or worse, Iran taking control of (or sabotaging) the Straights of Hormuz (through which most Middle Eastern oil flows).

The use of more nuclear power in the West will greatly reduce the use of foriegn gas, and perhaps even foreign oil (through hydrogen generation or, more likely, the use of plug-in hybrid cars).

The risks from nuclear waste, short-term and long-term, are negligible compared to those from the wastes and toxic materials emitted and/or generated by fossil plants.

FOr the short term, fossil plants cause ~25,000 deaths ANNUALLY in the US alone, and are the leading single cause of global warming. Western nuclear power has never had any measurable impact on public health or the environment.

As for the long term, many of the wastes and toxic materials created by fossil plants (and by many other industries for that matter) are generated in thousands of times greater volume, are more dispersible and prone to leaking, leaching and spreading, and do not decay away over any time period. A hundred thousand years from now, the lingering risks/effects of all the pollution being emitted right now by our coal plants (mercury, arsenic, etc..) will vastly exceed any effects from Yucca mountain, even assuming maximum concievable leakage. It's just that, for these other waste streams, people have simply (and arbitrarily) never cared.

The conventional wisdom that nuclear waste is unique in terms of long-term risk has no technical basis, and is completely false.

The article described one possible way to transmute heavy metals through the use of externally generated neutrons.

However, that method is more expensive and complicated than it needs to be. Fission reactors are wonderful sources of neutrons; the flux level inside power reactors is hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than would be provided by a device such as the one described by Schulenberg.

Generating neutrons by aiming accelerated protons into lead is requires a complex accelerator system that is itself an energy hog.

Heavy metal transmutation is simply a fancy term for fission - this is the process that keeps reactors hot and allows them to turn thermal energy into useful mechanical energy through the use of steam or gas turbines.

If you want to learn more, please visit www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com or www.atomicinsights.com and use the site search to look for recycle or waste. There is plenty of food for thought there.

In response to the very first comment on the list - which stated "natural uranium stock is much smaller than that of oil and gas" you are absolutely correct if you are measuring by mass or volume.

However, a pound of uranium has the energy content of 2,000,000 pounds of oil. To put that in perspective, it would take 30 full tanker trucks to contain the same amount of energy as I could hold in my hand in three "shooter" marble sized balls of uranium. I like the fact that the stocks are "smaller" and require far less transportation infrastructure to move them to the places where people can use them.

Your comment also ignores thorium, which is about twice as abundant as uranium and has similar energy content. There is PLENTY for everyone, which is certainly not the case when oil, gas, coal, wood, wind, sun, waves, geothermal, and falling water are your only energy sources.

Transmutation is one possible way of eliminating spent fuel. But a more probable scenario, IMO, is pyroreprocessing of spent fuel. It separates the bigger atoms with long half-lives from the smaller fission fragments with short half-lives that have built up and is sent back into the reactor. Because it doesn't preferentially separate fissile plutonium or uranium and includes the "transuranics", it is proliferation resistant.

Everyone seems to forget that Nuclear Plants release potentially dangerous radioactivity while in operation. True, the waste is much worse, but a study at UMASS Amherst back in the 90s found 8 times the amount of Down's Syndrone down wind from a plant near there. The radioactive steam isn't "healthy" like a daily vitamin as some scientists have claimed. Health studies usually sample in concentric circles around the plant rather than down wind.

Still not an option for this Tree Hugger.

Everyone seems to forget that Nuclear Plants release potentially dangerous radioactivity while in operation. True, the waste is much worse, but a study at UMASS Amherst back in the 90s found 8 times the amount of Down's Syndrone down wind from a plant near there. The radioactive steam isn't "healthy" like a daily vitamin as some scientists have claimed. Health studies usually sample in concentric circles around the plant rather than down wind.

...of which 0 is ever released in normal operation.

The steam released is radioactive; it is just as radioactive as these in lakes and from your tap.