Worse, actually

I think CO2 storage is a worse issue than nuclear.

Nuclear sites are protected, flagged as irradiated and have been, I hope, reasonably secured against leakage.

Whereas carbon storage will be anywhere, under any pretext, and will leak with comparative ease. Also, it is not deadly unless one breathes no oxygen at all, so leaking CO2 is not the thing one will call 911 for. Heck, it'll probably go undetected without special sensors in place.

Unless there is a massive leak that fills a basin and kills all breathing creatures in it so somebody just has to notice, there will be absolutely no warning or even worry over it.

Of course, once it has escaped into the atmosphere and causes a notable increase in temperatures, then there will be panic - but largely too late.

Nuclear waste does not leak like that, and is not a cause for global warming. On top of that, nuclear waste may take millenia before becoming harmless, but in the end, it does become harmless.

you miss one point

in comparing CO2 sequestration with nuclear waste disposal. Vegetation can use the CO2 and turn it into sugar and oxygen. AFAIK, nothing can do likewise with nuclear waste. So perhaps the solution (If CO2 sequestration becomes an issue) is to maintain a large area of dense vegetation around any CO2 sequestration dumping grounds so that the leaks can be dealt with naturally. It won't hurt the plants. In fact, they'd probably like it.

CO2 and Nuclear Waste

Dave as a nuclear engineer I love your thoughts on it. BUT you need to get your thoughts on CO2 correct. It is NOT the CO2 or water vapor GHGs that causes the warming. It is the extra added energy photons that are absorbed and delayed that cause the warming. If all the incoming photons are already delayed to produce our normal 32C of GHE warming,(& we still have excess water vapor in the ocean) then there are NO more photons available to cause more warming if you add more excess GHGs to the air. This is why when it rains and the number of GHG water vapor molecules increases you do not get any extra warming. The energy photons are limiting, not the amount of GHGs. The IPCC Climate Scientists can't do the science correctly.

It follows then that if there is already excess CO2 in the air, then it doesn't matter if we add more. It will not add to the warming. Extra CO2 is not a problem. The professor is a nut case.

@Pirate Dave

Radioactive waste /might/ cause a few interesting mutations. Maybe. Depending on the waste.

CO2 /might/ be beneficial to some plants. Maybe. If it's in low enough quantities.

If a /lot/ of the really bad radioactive waste (from a disposal site)was put in one place and leaked, it would cause a large amount of devastation in a /very/ confined area. We are talking a few dozen, or maybe a couple hundred meters here. So your disposal site leaks, and you kill everything for a hundred meters.

If your giant underground storage tank of CO2 suddenly escapes, you can kill every living thing for dozens of kilometres. Not just people, but plants too. Those plants, at night, require oxygen to survive. Admittedly, it takes a stupid amount of CO2 to kill a plant, but you most certainly can kill a plant with CO2. Non plants are basically boned.

Radioactive material isn’t good for any living being, but can be used in a productive fashion by humanity.

I think it is very fair to say that the leak OF A STORAGE FACILITY is equally bad. Remember what we’re talking about here. Storage facilities. We are not talking Chernobyl, or an atomic weapon where several pounds of highly radioactive and a few tonnes of marginally radioactive material are blow up and spread across a wide area, giving everything for hundreds of kilometres new and exotic cancers.

We’re talking about a gigantic cement hole in the ground that is monitored religiously developing a crack. Even if you just dumped all this stuff in a cave, provided you were remotely intelligent and designed your storage facility to not be capable of leaking wasted into the watershed, you’re golden for millennia.

Let me tell you how to store radioactive waste so you don’t actually have to /care/ about leaks:

Drill a very large hole as far down into the bedrock as you can. Fill with waste. Cover with cement. This is significantly below any part of the water table, and won’t be spreading or what have you. The cement plug might crack or erode, but there should be the better part of a kilometre worth of Other Stuff between your very small hole of radioactive wastes and the water table. Radioactive waste doesn’t “leak out.” It doesn’t ooze, drip or mix with the atmosphere. It’s METAL. It sits there and emits whatever form radiation that particular substance emits and otherwise doesn’t move.

CO2 is a gas: to store it in a carbon capture scenario, you are storing it at several times atmospheric pressure. One tiny crack in that storage container, (be it geological or otherwise,) and the pressure differential will evacuate all your stored CO2 very quickly. It will then spread: a cloud of suffocating death that will wipe out anything that requires oxygen for X distance around, where X is the result of a formula taking into account the amount of pressure the original deposit was under, the size of the hole (and how much the evacuating gasses erode the hole as they escape,) the topology of the area and the amount of CO2 stored at that location.

If you want to know how deadly CO2 can be to large areas, please ring up the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and arrange to spend some time talking with a volcanologist. They will set you straight.

A big lump of radioactive material, even if it is sitting in a field somewhere is a slow-acting threat to which there is plenty of time to respond, it is /incredibly/ localised, and a fantastically easy problem to solve.

A gigatonne of CO2 under thirty atmospheres of pressure escaping through a hole the size of a fridge is the ecological equivalent of a multi-kilometer carpet bomb.

OK then

you're getting there, but still talking about vastly different quantities. Which weighs more - a gigatonne of CO2 or a gigatonne of nuclear waste?

Surely a gigatonne of CO2 would be bad for the surrounding area for a short while. But assuming the designers had brains and situated the storage facility in a place with somewhat prevailing winds (to disperse any leakages), in a relatively shortish time the CO2 will disperse into the wider atmosphere and no longer be much of a problem, and continuing dispersion will reduce the problem as time progresses. However, if a "gigatonne" of nuclear waste escapes into the atmosphere (say, one of your shafts getting being blown up by "terrists" before it's capped), then you have radioactive contamination over a wide spread area that's (for a while) only going to get worse as the waste disperses.

Come to think of it, if you dropped a gigatonne of pretty much ANYTHING on a small area, it will be bad for that area. Even water.

@Pirate dave

Where exactly did you mention the idea that the radioactive material would become airborne? This is about "leaks" of stored waste. Radioactive material doesn't become airborn unless you blow it up. STORED radioactive material all the more so. It might become exposed to hte environment, but I fail to see how radioactive material in a storage depot ever becomes airborne. So that's not avoiding anything you said at all; you have not once brought this up as an airborne contaminant before this.

If I store CO2 in an underground cavern and it leaks, it's horrifically dangeros. If I store radioactive material in a cavern, and it leaks...then a very small area is affected.

*IF* radioactive material is blown up and becomes "airborne," then any area covered in a sufficient amount of it may experience a spate of new and exotic cancers. A stupendous amount of t it becoming airborne may kill outright if it is the right kind of radioactive material. (Gamma emitting.)

The chances of that are tremendously slim, and the damage would still be remarkably localised. A gigaton of CO2 espacing is still far more dangerous than a small dirty bomb. And let’s not play game shere, we aren’t talking about a gigaton of radioactive material, no matter how much you want to try to compare radioactive wastes to CO2 gram for gram. We’re talking about a cavern full of CO2 versus the infinitesimal chance that some dude is going to nick a bunch of gamma emitting radioactive waste (without killing himself) and then build a dirty bomb out of it.

Let me tell you how it works: if he build a dirty bomb, then unless he can get it to detonate at 1700 feet, the spread will be crap. It *might* contaminate a couple of blocks if detonated at ground level with a powerful enough explosive. It won’t do ANYTHING if detonated much above 1700 feet because the material will be spread too thin to do more than cause a few cancers. You *aren’t* going to build a nuclear bomb out of any of this stuff, because that kind of fuel gets burned in the reactors.

CO2 on the other hand is viewed by people such as yourself to be relatively harmless, and so in the real world some yonk will try to compress 100 gigatons of the stuff into a salt mine. Eventually a crack will form and you will have a small province WIPED OUT.

Radioactive material is, gram for gram more deadly than CO2. When talking about LONG TERM STORAGE of these materials however, Radioactive materials are infinitely safer than carbon sequestration.

I volunteer

shawnfromnh and Lawrence Blunt to road-test 'population control'. C'mon guys, you talk the talk, so let's see if you walk the plank. After all, if really passionate and committed eugenicists will not lead by example, what hope is there of ever implementing the program?

Re: I volunteer

I've volunteered already, and done my bit for population control. I have no children, nor will I have any. Do you have children, Luther?

Wrong.

See www.dotyenergy. They dispute about every claim out there, and bio and algae fuels are some of them.

We either don't have the land, don't have the water to support the plants, or don't have the money.

As for power, you've not heard of Wind's biggest issue have you? what to do with over-generation and off-peak power have you? Wind farms are literally PAYING people to take the energy during certain hours of the day. It;s a huge cost. If someone would pay a rate even a penny per KW wind farms could become 30-50% cheaper to operate. An RFTS plant only needs 4-5 hours of power per day to make enough H2 through electrolysis to feed RFTS to make fuel all day long (and storing H2 under low pressure locally to be used is clean and safe, using it is cars is NOT!) They can switch over and take power from the grid in less than 1/60th of a second, becoming a perfect system for grid balancing overproduction, and making wind generation cheaper (balancing the output from a wind farm is very difficult and expensive).

@tfb

Yes, it's still nailed to its perch.

There's too many bets riding on this dead parrot.