im no fan of nuclear power by any means....but ....the problem of waste disturbs me....and im sure someone must have thought on this before.....im not sure in what form the nuclear waste is buried.....what springs to mind for me is that it should be returned to its natural state and returned to whence it came in the form of uranium oxide (or uranium ore) albeit with fewer protons or whatever
its a naturally occuring substance after all...albeit heavily purified....so maybe in disposal it should be de-purified to its natural state
its still not carbon efficient though
and i think its yucky yucky poopoo....very clever...but poopoo
nuclear waste
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Stonehead
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Re: nuclear waste
The problem is that there is no safe long-term storage method in use in the UK. The government simply orders review after review after review in order to put off making any decisions.bazil wrote:im no fan of nuclear power by any means....but ....the problem of waste disturbs me....and im sure someone must have thought on this before.....im not sure in what form the nuclear waste is buried.....what springs to mind for me is that it should be returned to its natural state and returned to whence it came in the form of uranium oxide (or uranium ore) albeit with fewer protons or whatever
its a naturally occuring substance after all...albeit heavily purified....so maybe in disposal it should be de-purified to its natural state
its still not carbon efficient though
and i think its yucky yucky poopoo....very clever...but poopoo
Outside the UK, a few methods are being used but as to whether they're safe and stable in the long-term? No one really knows - how can anyone know when they're dealing with storage for hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years.
I do think there is a global need for a handful of very small, properly built, tightly supervised and scrutinised nuclear reactors for medical and research purposes.
Other than that, nuclear fission power stations should be progressively wound down. And as for Tony Blair's nuclear is the answer to the world's energy problems - he must be aware not only of the waste issue but also of the fact that there isn't enough uranium to replace oil and gas for more than a couple of decades, if that.
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Welsh Girls Allotment
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Muddypause
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Until we know what to do with the waste the idea is absolutely untenable. And the issue is not just hundreds or even thousands of years - some of this stuff has a half life of tens of thousands of years. That's the time till it is half as potent; another few tens of thousands of years till it halves again.
But that's just numbers; you have to put it into context to grasp the implications of what we're doing when we advocate nuclear power.
In less than a mere two thousand years, Britain has been ruled and invaded by the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans. We've had probably 100 ruling kings, and nearly 75 governments. We've been involved in dozens, possibly hundreds of wars, two of which were on a world wide scale. World wide, several major empires have risen and fallen.
That's the sort of thing that civilisation goes through in two thousand years. Less than 10 thousand years ago, Windsacle, Dounrea, et al, were all under the ice cap of the last ice age. This stuff will still be dangerous in a hundred thousand years. We will have to store it, secure it, monitor it, and pass on that information to future generations. We will also have to assume that no future power will abuse what we have left behind, and that future generations will be willing, and have the means, to take care of it.
How long has the longest empire survived? How long has civilisation existed? In a time sacle of thousands of years, complete civilisations rise and fall, and are only known about through acheaological exploration. Many civilisations have kept records of what they did, and how they organised themselves, yet scholars only have the scantest of ideas about them now. The idea that all our computer databases, all our archives, all our state records, all our millions of hours of news footage, will be accessible and readable in a few thousand years time doesn't seem plausible me. I have stuff on computer discs that I can't access even ten years after I filed them away. The shear volume of record keeping that we do these days may render them utterly inaccessable to future researchers.
Yet we expect them to know about what we are doing with this stuff.
But that's just numbers; you have to put it into context to grasp the implications of what we're doing when we advocate nuclear power.
In less than a mere two thousand years, Britain has been ruled and invaded by the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans. We've had probably 100 ruling kings, and nearly 75 governments. We've been involved in dozens, possibly hundreds of wars, two of which were on a world wide scale. World wide, several major empires have risen and fallen.
That's the sort of thing that civilisation goes through in two thousand years. Less than 10 thousand years ago, Windsacle, Dounrea, et al, were all under the ice cap of the last ice age. This stuff will still be dangerous in a hundred thousand years. We will have to store it, secure it, monitor it, and pass on that information to future generations. We will also have to assume that no future power will abuse what we have left behind, and that future generations will be willing, and have the means, to take care of it.
How long has the longest empire survived? How long has civilisation existed? In a time sacle of thousands of years, complete civilisations rise and fall, and are only known about through acheaological exploration. Many civilisations have kept records of what they did, and how they organised themselves, yet scholars only have the scantest of ideas about them now. The idea that all our computer databases, all our archives, all our state records, all our millions of hours of news footage, will be accessible and readable in a few thousand years time doesn't seem plausible me. I have stuff on computer discs that I can't access even ten years after I filed them away. The shear volume of record keeping that we do these days may render them utterly inaccessable to future researchers.
Yet we expect them to know about what we are doing with this stuff.
Stew
Ignorance is essential
Ignorance is essential