UNEP/Frankfurt School Investment figures in so called "renewable energy" 2006-2016.

[NNadir]

12. Really? This statement is "engineering and science?" I have spent 30 years studying the...

...chemistry and physics of used nuclear fuel, but first let me ask you a different question which is exactly the same, except for the fact that the storage of used nuclear fuel is only remarkable since its storage, despite the incessant caterwauling of anti-nukes, hasn't killed anyone.

I suspect that you clearly don't give a shit about this question I will ask, given your selective attention, clearly, but here it is:

Where is humanity putting 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide, along with heavy metals, carcinogenic organic compounds and other horrible stuff that constitutes dangerous fossil fuel waste?? Do you have a "safe and reliable" "harmless" way to store it forever?

Do you know where it's being "stored" right now, today? I'll tell you where: It's being "stored" in every living organism on the planet, in the cells, tissues, organs of every living organism on earth or in the matrices on which every organism on earth depends, specifically air, water and soil.

I repeatedly refer to the 7 million people killed each year from air pollution which is dangerous fossil fuel waste as well as dangerous biomass combustion waste, and typically, in classic anti-nuke selective attention, I get a selective attention response.

When, exactly, despite all the "waste mentality" caterwauling about it, has so called "Nuclear waste" killed seventy million people in a ten year period, for example the last ten years, when, again, the world squandered more than two trillion dollars on so called renewable energy while the death toll from air pollution and climate change continued to rise, not fall?

Of course, when I raise this point, I hear nothing but insipid - to the point of criminal - whining. "We're not talking about air pollution! We're not talking about air pollution!"

Why for the love of God are you not talking about air pollution!?!

Again, why are you not concerned with 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year? You are aware, aren't you than 70,000 people reportedly died in 2003 from exposure to high temperatures in Europe? It was reported in the scientific literature:Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003 (Comptes Rendus Biologies Volume 331, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 171–178)

You think that dealing with climate change is easy, but dealing with used nuclear fuel is difficult? Really? Are you willing to get serious, or are you just pulling my leg?

Who, exactly, do you think you're talking to? Some airhead on a "wind and solar are great!" website run by people who have never taken or passed an engineering or science course in their pathetic lives?

Science and engineering? Really?

In the United States, the used nuclear fuel removed from nuclear reactors and largely stored where they were generated amounts to about 75,000 metric tons. This, accumulated over more than half a century. It amounts in mass, to 2.08 millionths the mass of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide which was release just last year, an amount released in 2014 that is roughly six billion tons higher than it was being released ten years ago ten years ago, when we began squandering trillions of dollars on temporary and useless junk that didn't work, isn't working and won't work to prevent the release of carbon dioxide from being even higher next year.

The 75,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel in the United States is roughly 95% unreacted uranium. Since it's very, very, very, very clear that anti-nukes can't do math, I'll do it: That means that a little over 71,000 tons of the content of used nuclear fuel is uranium, an element of the periodic table that has been naturally found on this planet - with easily measured billions tons being present in the Earth's oceans alone - since the Earth formed from supernovae ashes.

Converted to plutonium, this 71,000 metric tons of uranium (which translates to 300 million moles of uranium), a tiny fraction of the naturally occurring examples of this element - since a fission of a single atom of plutonium releases, not counting neutrinos, 199 MeV of energy - is the equivalent of 572 exajoules of energy, coincidentally very close to the amount of energy, all the dangerous natural gas, all the dangerous coal, all the dangerous petroleum, all the river destroying hydroelectric facilities, all the biomass produced by the destruction of natural ecosystems for factory farming, and, of course, including the trivial and useless contribution from so called "renewable" energy that sucked 2.4 trillion dollars out of the world economy for no fucking result in just the last ten years.

In fact, overall, in terms of the total uranium already mined, and including the radioactive waste from the wind industry, specifically the thorium from China's lanthanide mines, we have enough energy content in uranium and thorium to provide all of humanity's energy needs for centuries. I detailed this, along with more than 50 references, elsewhere, on a website put together by an Australian environmental scientist: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come This is only one of many suggestions I've made in pop blogging settings. A friend of mine once posted a list, some years, 2010, back of some of my writings on this topic. Reference to some of my thoughts on used nuclear fuel, 2010

Now, as I've continued my research, I may have changed some of my ideas from back in 2010 and before, since I've grown in my respect for the problems that the constituents of used nuclear fuel, might be utilized to accomplish for future generations, but the basic concept remains unchanged: My "solution" to the problem of so called "nuclear waste" is to utilize all of the valuable constituents therein.

Used nuclear fuel for the most part consists of largely insoluble solids, with some minor exceptions. Carbon dioxide is a gas. Which is easier to contain, 75,000 tons of solids or hundreds of billions of tons of gases?

Now you ask me to tell you what I think we should do with what you and not I, call nuclear waste?

My interest in used nuclear fuel and the radioactive and non-radioactive materials in used nuclear fuel began in April of 1986 when Chernobyl blew up when I pulled the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics off the bookshelf to look up the half-lives of the released elements. I encountered a term called the "neutron capture cross section," about which I knew very little, and began to research the topic in what were then paper based scientific libraries, libraries I routinely used in my day to day life in any case.

Slowly at first, and with increasing intensity, I began to study the subject in depth...considerable depth.

In the mid 1990's much of the world's scientific literature became available in electronic form and I began collecting papers relating to non-nuclear and nuclear scientific issues electronically and saving them on my computer. Of course after roughly a decade of reading papers on paper I already knew a lot more by the mid 1990's about nuclear materials than I did in 1986, but when the electronic format became available, I would say my knowledge exploded relative to what it had been before.

I have more than 600,000 files in my computer, and in the sub directory in my Energy and Environment sub-directory is a directory called "nuclear" and in that directory another sub-directory called "Fuel." There are according to the "properties" function in Windows 10, exactly 8,615 files in this sub-directory.

You ask me to tell you what I think we should do with what you and not I, call nuclear waste?

Did you do any work at all before asking this question or is just the recitation of lazy pablum that you think allows you to make a judgement about humanity's fate?

I know exactly what to do with used nuclear fuels since I know that there are no constituents in that are not valuable. It happens that radioactive materials can do lots of things that nothing else can do.

Of the 75,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel in the United States, about 1% of it is plutonium and 4% is fission products. In a world far less stupid than the one we apparently live in, one in which dangerous fossil fuel waste can kill 70 million people every decade while people whine about what they call, with their weak "waste" mentality, "nuclear waste" which has existed for more than half a century without killing anyone, those fission products would be seen for what they clearly are, gifts to future generations which might well save the world.

Radioactive materials are subject, in their accumulation, to a differential equation known as the Bateman equation The solutions to this equation demonstrate that there is a maximal amount of any radioactive material that can accumulate before it is decaying exactly at the same rate it is being formed and that the more radioactive it is, the smaller this quantity will be.

In a way this inviolable law of mathematical physics is unfortunate, since radiation can do things that nothing else can do as well, mineralize persistent organic pollutants, in particular dangerous halogenated compounds, as I briefly reported in this space by appeal to the scientific literature recently: Direct exposure of polychlorinated biphenyls to the radiation field of used nuclear fuel.

Don't talk to me about "Science and Engineering" with a glib superficial and clearly mindless reference to so called "nuclear waste" unless you're willing to learn something about science and engineering. Clearly the nature of your question indicates that you haven't done a damned thing to understand nuclear technology and, like most anti-nukes, are merely criticizing something you know nothing about.

By the way, I used to be a nuclear critic before 1986, because I knew nothing at all about nuclear science. The only difference between you and me is that unlike you, I questioned my assumptions.

If you are willing to do that, question your assumptions you will have a right to speak. If one refuses to do that and simply chants insipid phrases over and over and over and over mindlessly, one should be ignored if one offers up garbage rhetoric which, again, kills people through moral and intellectual indifference.

Have a nice Sunday,.