Reply #16: Really, so called nuclear waste is expensive? Let's do math...

[NNadir]

Let us assume, like we assume all kinds of stupid stuff on this website, that it really will cost $100 billion dollars to deal with so called "nuclear waste."

All of the so called "nuclear waste" has accumulated over 40 years. Of course, the cost of disposal has been driven up by stupid drivel from people who don't understand the first thing about nuclear energy, by people who can't - when you ask them - produce a single person anywhere who has ever been actually injured by the storage of nuclear waste.

US nuclear capacity has been running at 600 billion kilowatt hours annually for about 15 years. 600 billion kilowatt hours is equal to 2.1 X 10^18 (2.1 exajoules) per year. Counting only the time since nuclear power production leveled off, we thus have that US nuclear reactors produced 3.2 X 10^19 joules of energy (32 exajoules) since 1990 alone.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html

One gallon of gasoline has about 121 MJ (121 X 10^J) of energy. Thus the energy produced by nuclear power plants is the equivalent of 268 billion gallons of gasoline. This represents a $0.37/gallon surcharge on the cost of nuclear power, if the same power were produced by burning gasoline.

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

However, the power rating for the nuclear power plants is delivered power, not the energy required for production. Since gasoline engines run at about 30% (ignoring the stupid comments were going to hear about combined cycles "could be, might be, may be, etc), the actual cost of so called "nuclear waste," FULLY LOADED, meaning the cost of the fuel, the waste, etc, etc still comes in at less than the equivalent of $0.15/gallon.

We will of course, as usual, ignore the costs of global climate change, the big elephant that anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists sweep under the rug with some dumb statement about how the cost of PV power is coming down from extraordinarily prohibitive to merely very prohibitive.

Now, this may sound prohibitive to someone who can't add and subtract, but to thinking people, this is a bargain:

Note that there is no known method to dispose of the wastes generated by gasoline, the most important of which is carbon dioxide, for any amount of money. None (that would be zero) of the health costs of air pollution is paid by the people who cause it (that would be people who burn gasoline and promote coal).

I note in passing that while the stupid sit around and whine insipidly about so called "nuclear waste," 200 billion dollars has been spent at the rate of 100 billion dollars a year filling our syringes with oil in Iraq, at the cost of 10's of thousands of human lives. And we haven't even got to Nigeria, never mind the tens of thousands of acres of land that have been permanently destroyed by events like those as Prince Edward Sound, off the coast of France, Santa Barbara, not to mention what has happened in Ecuador, and Venezuela, not to mention our atmosphere.

Now maybe the equivalent of 0.40/gallon is too much to pay for absolutely clean air for uneducated mathematically illiterate Greenpeace twits who belong to the middle class and who are completely indifferent to the rest of humanity, but to most people, it would be a bargain.

Nuclear energy is the only form of energy wherein a solution to waste is feasible, and mind you, Yucca Mountain relies completely on technology that is too primitive for words.

Of course the only way to represent nuclear energy as dangerous, expensive, blah, blah, blah, ad nauseum is to pretend that nuclear energy exists in isolation. It doesn't. Fossil fuels are destroying the world right now, and all the stupid hype about 1 megawatt biomass (air polluting and water polluting) power plants will do zero (as in nothing as in zip as in nada) to arrest this tragedy.

Ignorance is the cause of the disaster. Ignorance is the cause of Resistance to nuclear energy.

Once again, when compared to its alternatives, nuclear energy is safer, cleaner and cheaper.

There is a solution, btw, to the disgusting, unethical and unsustainable environmental impact of animal husbandry: It's called vegetarianism. I've never been to one, since I am an environmentalist, but I'll bet they serve hamburgers at Greenpeace meetings, which is why Greenpeace meetings are at best hypocritical nonsense. Let's be clear: Without oil, there aren't going to be very many slaughterhouses, or cruel cow and pig pens. Meat is oil. Every cow is the equivalent of 5,200 gallons of water and 284 gallons of oil. When the Ogallala water reserve, now being pumped at 13 trillion gallons per year to feed the hamburger anti-environmental crowd is depleted, there isn't going to be much cow shit to go around.

http://www.earthsave.org/environment/foodchoices.htm

The cow shit/horse shit fantasy, like all of the (dumb) solutions proposed by anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists is an elaborate shell game. It won't work, which is why it isn't being done already. They may as well go back to telling us about the wonders of solar hydrogen.