NOAA Study: Radiation From Fukushima Very Dilluted, Seafood Safe

What do we do with the waste? It's mostly ( >90% ) more dangerous than ore. The biggest problem with Fuckishima (sic) is the ponds of waste. Scaremongering aside, when solar is cheaper for a country than nuclear, why go with nuclear? (as is the case in my country)

Off the top of your head, how much coal do you think needs to be burned to power your house for 30 years? How much high-level nuclear waste do you think is generated from powering it with nuclear?

Photovoltaic solar is nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear. If you live somewhere where it's cheaper, then you're probably failing to subtract out government subsidies from the equation. Hydro is cheaper, but already tapped out in most developed countries. Wind is getting close, at about 1.5-2x more expensive. If you live in an area with strong, consistent, and abundant winds (like one of the respondents in Portugal), it's probably already cheaper than nuclear/coal. Solar thermal can be the cheapest yet, but due to directly converting the solar energy into heat its applications are limited.

Back to my first questions. It takes about a train car full of coal to power your house for 30 years. That's how much mass is turned into pollution - either ash or particulates which get into the atmosphere (including trace amounts of atomic mercury, uranium, and thorium - the trace uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself). In contrast, nuclear can provide the same amount of electricity while generating about a tablespoon of high level waste. Yes when you scale up to the electrical needs of an entire country, the amount of nuclear waste starts to look scary. But only if you fail to scale the alternatives - the waste is a minuscule amount compared to pollution from fossil fuels. The U.S. generates about 20% of its electricity from nuclear. In the process, it generates about 2000 tons of raw high-level waste each year. 2000 tons would (if consolidated) fit into two tractor trailers. When I did the same calc for coal, it came out to something ridiculous like 15,000 oil tankers. And that's ignoring that a significant fraction of the mass is converted into high-volume gases (primarily CO2, with the O2 taken from the air) and released into the atmosphere. That's why the U.S. been able to run nuclear plants for ~60 years without a waste storage site. There's so little waste generated that the nuclear plants have just been storing decades worth of it on-site in pools of water.

As for what to do with the nuclear waste, it's only called waste because of politics. Our current fission reactors only extract a few percent of the fissile energy contained in the uranium. That's why the waste is radioactive for so long - it still contains almost all of the energy of the radionuclide decay chain. You can extract most of the remaining energy by using the "waste" as fuel in a breeder reactor, which in turn converts it into a form which can be used as fuel in regular reactors. This in turn results in waste which only needs to be stored for a bit over a hundred years. This is why a repository like Yucca Mountain was a good idea. Until fusion reactors become viable and widescale, future generations would probably view Yucca Mountain as a fuel source, not a long-term waste storage site. Unfortunately, one of the fissile products of breeder reactors is weapons-grade plutonium. So politically, reprocessing (as it's called) is unappealing.

joe bodolai ben nelson extreme couponing taylor lautner sinead o connor dan marino passing record ipad 2 cases