Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Fukushima - The Elephant in the Room

I don't think Mother Gaia actually gives a rodent's patootey one way or the other whether the denizens who scurry about her surface foul their nests or not. When the food and the water and the air are sufficiently poisoned we will die. Mother Gaia will never notice one way or the other that we are gone. We've had a good run, and we aren't done yet, every day is a good day to live and every day is
a good day to die.

When the village started to stink too much and the game was hard to find the old ones packed there sh*t and moved a few miles. We've stunk up everything and have noplace left to run.
It's justice in a way. The poetic kind.

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From Joe's link :

The fact that, after 70 years, the government and the nuclear industry have not come up with a sensible procedure for dealing with spent fuel and nuclear waste, is sufficient reason to be unalterably opposed to nuclear "power."

My memory of this is every time a "plan" is decided upon truck loads of watermelons cry "foul !", and come up with a long litany of reasons why:

1. Spent Fuel can't be safely moved to any storage site because:
a. The shipping casks can't be secured.
b. The shipping casks are vulnerable to accident.
c. Terrorists could seize the shipping casks/spent fuel.
d. Transport would expose the public to radiation.

2. Any storage site has to secure the "waste" for 10K+ years.

a. Because it takes that long for radiation to decay.
b. Terrorists might seize the site and spent fuel.
c. The storage casks might deteriorate over time.
d. Above ground/monitored storage is too vulnerable.
e. Entombment threatens the water table.
f. Distant generations might not understand the dangers posed.

3. Reprocessing is "unacceptable" as a means of reducing fuel pool storage because:

a. It requires transport to a facility.
b. Reprocessing exposes workers to radiation.
c. Reprocessing creates more high-level waste.

and so on.......

Meanwhile "spent fuel" (i.e. about 10% used) is kept permanently in temporary storage ! Eighty plus percent of its "fuel value" is idle and unused. Design/development/construction of safer, more efficient reactors - even designs with tens of thousands of hours of successful pilot operattions - capable of using the "spent fuel" safely.

And on it goes. >Mech

Oh but they have come up with many plans, some more viable than others. Mechanic mentioned a few of the problems with them, or perhaps you could call them excuses not to impliment any plan at all.

Not In My Back Yard

As much as you whine and moan, as fearful as you pretend to be for future generations, and as many videos you find of people who agree with you, Nuclear Power Generation is not going away. It's not going away just like the petroleum industry is not going away, even after that devastating oil spill. Even after the Japanese catastrophe, it's not going away because teeming billions upon billions of people live on this planet and they all demand fuel and electricity.
Eventually scientists and engineers will perfect alternate energy systems but that day has not arrived and no amount of hand wringing is going to hurry it along.

Well stated Mech. I have been trying to say the same on this board for 4+ years but never as succinctly as you have stated. It is a political problem--not scientific. It is fear of ghosts and the invisible with no context. It is not reality based. But I did get a kick out of that hoser from Alberta with his Geiger counter nonsense. Reminded me of an old skit from SNL hence the Canadian version of that program I linked.

And it is most definitely NIMBY as Greger stated. I have driven several times through Nevada and Utah and have seen the big white semis with the nuclear signs plastered on the sides going into the bowels of Nevada. No one hears a thing about that as there are no whistle blowers on this (of that I am pleased--oh the humanity!). I don’t know what they are doing with that waste but in all likelihood it is nuclear medical waste but I really don’t know. “Waste” that has saved lives I may add. Who cares.

None of this is logical. Anti nuke fundamentalists remind me of Tea Partiers coming from the other direction. There is no way they can be reasoned with and their dogma is set in scripture. There minds were made up decades ago and are as slammed shut as a bank vault door.