Spanish towns vie for nuclear dump prize The Catalonian town of Ascó yesterday voted to bid for a controversial €700m nuclear waste dump, joining Yebra in Castilla-La Mancha as the second candidate to date* for the lucrative honour of storing the spent output of Spain's nuclear power programme. The town council, with widespread local support, voted seven to two in …
"If the government wants to solve the nuclear waste problem [...] once and for all, it will have to table a good plan for closing nuclear plants."
Because of course, if you close the nuclear power plants, the magical fairies come and take away your existing nuclear waste so you don't have to worry about it. And the pixies come and remove the radioactive material from your decommissioned power stations, so you don't have to store that either.
You can't just build a nuclear waste storage facility large enough to store the existing waste and reasonably foreseeable future waste. No no no, that won't work because of the elves!
A clean technology which produces gigawatts of electricity for a minimal waste product and theyre against it...
When it is the only clean technology that has even the slightest chance of producing our energy needs in the next decades let alone next century, you would think they would support it. But no, because a radioactive material dug up from the ground (where it is radioactive already), used to produce the energy (making use of that radioactivity) and then is stored (usually back underground) whilst still being radioactive is bad...
F*ckin greenies need there heads read...
@ lglethal
Are you in P.R for the nuclear industry??
Given that the 'minimal' waste you mention is toxic for many thousands of years, and that Governments can't seem to keep an accurate track of their nuclear materials, and that such materials would be welcomed by any nutter terrorist group for making dirty nuclear bombs ... "this f*ckin' greenie" is totally against nuclear power.
A reasonably fair (what? never!) prog on BBC R4 last night (repeated Sunday and currently available on iPlayer) investigating why (some) green supporters appear to dislike technological solutions to environmental problems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00q3cnl
Every couple thousand years a new religion pops out from nothing... ok there are exceptions such as the states which a cult appears from nothing every couple hours... but let’s ignore the exception...
Today, the greenies aren't more than a new cult tending to be religion...
In the next decade or so some of the evangelical greens would become fundamentalists... Soon after that humanity will see a new generation of green terror against all not-that-greenies.
So in the next century society will be divided in 3 branches...
The greenies
The technocrats
The religious
Since consensuses between these groups aren’t possible, WW3 is ignited by one of the parties...
All will perish in the war... so no one will judge who was right or wrong...
This was written by Nostradamus, just need to read it between his lines.
Some time back when this Global Warming stuff first became seriously trendy, I followed a link to the Carbon Trust website.
Amongst all the doom 'n gloom, facts, figures 'n such was an article on a low carbon future from some environmental futurist type. Billed as something like an idealistic utopia of teleworking and better public transport, it turned out to be a vision of some pseudo Iron-Age agrarian hell.
I decided at that point that a warmer climate was the better option. Up to your knees in water or up to your knees in horseshit? I'll paddle thanks.
Hmm, I can't find the article there now. I wonder why?
Used nuclear fuel pellets produce low grade heat forever. According to:
http://mb-soft.com/public2/nucpower.html
pellets are removed from service when they contain 1.5% u235, enough to sustain fission if suitably moderated.
Even if not moderated, these pellets will give off heat by natural decay of the uranium and daughter elements inside. This heat can be captured and used for domestic space heating and hot water.
The author of the web page above suggests using CO2 as a heat transfer medium because it does not become "significantly" radioactive.
Of course, if i had a choice of a Data Center or a cask of spent nuclear fuel in my back yard...
I'd've thought it would be such small quantities it wouldn't be a huge hassle for the sun. Chucking Earth at it might have slightly more effect, though.
I believe the major problem with "chuck it at space/the sun/the aliens" is in fact the minor issues we seem to have with getting rockets up there without delays, fireworks displays or other problems - as easy a solution as it would be to have a few tons of spent reactor rods falling into the deep of the Atlantic, the greens would probably shout, scream and bitch a lot.
Well, more than usual.
...and one of them works at Asco nuclear power station. The catfish in the river there, the Ebro, are as big as trucks.
The town has benefited hugely from the nuke station and local amenities are excellent for rural Spain, but there was talk that the station was to be decommissioned.
Haven't seen any of Mr Burns' three-eyed jobbies there yet but it can only be a matter of time.
Maybe if we were talking about tens of thousands of tons of v. heavy metals.
But we're not. Dumping all of humanity's nuclear waste to date into the sun will do aproximately nothing whatsoever.
More importantly, GETTING all the waste there will consume enormous amounts of energy. Better to just dig a big hole, line it with concrete, fill it up with radioactive waste and then pile half a kilometer of dirt on top.
As for a heat transfer medium, you'd better off using helium, which doesn't become long term radioactive at all.
Dig a big hole, dump all the waste in there...
Nononono! You want the waste dumped in little holes around. Buncefield (UK) or Toulouse (France) should tell you why storing lots of dangerous blowy-uppy stuff together is a REALLY BAD IDEA.
You can chuck a rod or two my way. The stuff they spray on the fields nowadays, I think I'd rather take my chances with good ol'fashioned radiation. I'll stick in in the hot water tank. Whoo, instant always hot water. Might glow a little, but hey, you can shower without bothering to put the light on. Even more energy savings! It's all good!
tectonic subduction zones.
Instead of finding the most geologically stable areas for your dump - sorry, storage facility - dump the waste into an area where crustal plates are being driven under.
Encase the waste so it will be protected for a couple of centuries, and let natural processes bury and dispose of it. Monitor the area for security purposes, to avoid the "eco-terrorist stealing some to use a weapon" cliche.
The Earth is naturally radioactive, even enriched waste wont make any difference.
Launching stuff into the sun is just too expensive and bad for the atmosphere unless we had something like a beanstalk/orbital elevator.
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