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hunter

(38,264 posts)
9. Spent nuclear fuel just sits there, going nowhere, doing nothing...
Sat Sep 16, 2017, 02:37 AM
Sep 2017

...slowly cooling off and becoming less radioative.



https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/dry-cask-storage.html

In a few hundred years it's much less trouble to deal with

Or it can be recycled. A delicate, but already accomplished process of comparable hazard to several other modern non-nuclear industrial processes, and less hazardous than some (Remember the Bhopal disaster?)

I'll confess, I have a few solar panels on hand for our next big California earthquake.

These panels might be excellent for keeping my wife's cell phone charged, but she'll probably be stuck at the hospital (it's a trauma center) which will be powered by big continuous rated CAT diesel standby generators which send a rumble through our house whenever the power goes out and whenever they are tested. (By some planning and good fortune my wife and I have avoided commuting since the mid-'eighties. We burn less gasoline than most drivers, but we are both close to work, and have to maintain that separation mentally.)

Many years ago I worked at a plant manufacturing single crystal solar panels. Nothing glamorous, I was big, strong, and moved fragile and expensive mechanical stuff. I'd started out moving household furniture, but I also had a two year technical degree, acquired when I was thinking I'd be an engineer. Anyways, the factory produced a lot of liquid chemical waste. Back then the chemical waste haulers didn't pay to much attention to what was actually in the waste, but they did require it to be neutral pH which was achieved by mixing the low pH acid wastes with the caustic high pH wastes in a big tank and stirring in whatever pool chemicals were required before the waste trucks arrived. The place where the haulers dumped the waste was later declared a superfund site, maybe not from the solar factory alone, but from other "clean" no-smokestack high tech industries.

Large numbers of the solar cells I see on my neighbor's roofs were manufactured in places with less stringent environmental regulations than the U.S.A. and from materials even more toxic than those used in single crystal silicon solar cells.

Measured in total tons of raw material moved around per exojoule of energy produced, I wonder how solar, wind, and nuclear compare.

But I don't worry much about used fuel rods stored in dry casks. There's so much worse stuff travelling down the highway, being transported by rail every day and it has killed people, sometimes destroyed entire towns.

The only solar project I really bash our large scale projects on previously undeveloped land. When my neighbors express pride in the panels on their roof, or I see panels installed over parking lots, I'm not bashing that.

I've done some math and I don't think their is anything we can do to make our high energy industrial society sustainable, except maybe nuclear energy and a worldwide standard of living and education that makes smaller families acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. That's a tall order, and if the second is achievable in some way, we might not need much high energy industry or nuclear power.

But electricity certainly improves individual standards of living, especially on larger scales of sewage treatment, cooking, laundry, heating, and cooling.



Ha! Eko Sep 2017 #1
Post removed Post removed Sep 2017 #3
Hm. byronius Sep 2017 #2
Reaction to this thread will be reflexive. hunter Sep 2017 #4
Sure. Eko Sep 2017 #5
What will they do? hunter Sep 2017 #6
Is nuclear? Eko Sep 2017 #7
Spent nuclear fuel just sits there, going nowhere, doing nothing... hunter Sep 2017 #9
Right. Igel Sep 2017 #8
Latest Discussions»Culture Forums»Science»Oh oh. A plutonium power...»Reply #9